UIViewController Custom Back Button Problem
If you want your apps to have their own identity, you should put time into adjusting its appearance, such as fonts and iconography. One thing that may be tricky, though, is to replace the default back button with a custom one. It should be simple, but I just can’t get it to work in one app.
The process is very simple. In viewDidLoad, just call some code to replace the
standard back button with a nice, custom arrow. It took me like five minutes to get
everything up and running, including importing the images to the project, do
1000 push-ups and watch some Epic Rap Battles on YouTube.
However, when I decided to revisit an old app of mine and add this feature to it, I couldn’t get it to work. The following kept me busy a whole evening:
- The app navigates to a table view controller from another table view controller.
- If I call the back button replacement code in
viewDidLoad, the original back button doesn’t disappear. Instead, the new back button is added on top of it. - If I call the code in
viewWillAppearorviewDidAppear, nothing happens… since these methods are never called.
I tried replacing the clean code I had with timers and other hacks, but nothing worked (luckily, I might add, since that is NOT the way you should solve this problem). I then found a post that suggested adding a fake back button amd remove it when replacing the real back button with a custom one:
self.navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithCustomView:[[UIView alloc] init]];
self.navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = nil;
self.navigationItem.hidesBackButton = YES;
self.navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = /* Set your bar button here */;
This solution is just strange, and should not work either…which it didn’t. The original back button shows briefly, before it disappears. Nothing is solved.
I’m still stuck with this problem, with no idea what is causing it. I don’t see this strange behavior in my other apps, even when adding the same original code. I even tried recreating the view controllers in a new project, with the same set of base classes and view lifecycle events, and it works just fine.
Any ideas, world?
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