Dynamically Change the TabBar at Runtime

[ggalante]

Good afternoon everyone. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help with this. I am officially stumped. Here is my problem.

I have a set of 4 tabs with views working great. My app has a second mode, called gameplay mode. In this mode, I want to display 4 completely different tabs with 4 new views. I am trying to find a way to dynamically switch between the two sets of tabs and controllers. Right now I have the follow code:

[tbc setViewControllers:tc animated:YES];
[tbc setSelectedViewController:[tc objectAtIndex:0]];

tbc is a TabBarController
tc is an NSMutableArray of ViewControllers

However this code simply empties the tab bar, and gives me a blank screen.

I tried including

[window addSubview:tbc.view];

in there as well, but that was a bust.

I tried adjusting the tabbar items by hand by using

[[tbc tabBar] setItems:ti animated:YES];

where ti is an array of items. That threw an exception saying this action was not allowed.

Has anyone ever gotten this to work? Has anyone been able to dynamically add a tab and it's controller at runtime? Thanks again for any help given. This has been a surprisingly difficult problem.

[ggalante]

SOLVED!

So here's the important stuff I was doing wrong. First make sure to alloc and init the array and views when you build your controllers. Here's how I built the array:

MyView1* vc1 = [[MyView1 alloc] init];
MyView2* vc2 = [[MyView2 alloc] init];
gpTabControllers = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
[gpTabControllers addObject:vc1];
[gpTabControllers addObject:vc2];

When you make the change to the new group of tabs, do this:

NSMutableArray *tc = gpTabControllers;
[tbc setViewControllers:tc animated:YES];
[window addSubview:tbc.view];

If you want to switch back, I would store the first group of controllers into another array. This might keep a lot of stuff in memory though.

Finally, you want to do the TabItems in the controllers themselves, which was where I was getting really confused. Overloading the init function in the MyView classes will do this. Here's a peak at what I added to those classes:

- (id)init {
	if (self = [super initWithNibName:@"MyView1" bundle:nil]) {
		self.title = @"Tab Item Title";
		
		UIImage* anImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"tabItemImg.png"];
		UITabBarItem* theItem = [[UITabBarItem alloc] initWithTitle:@"Tab Item Title" image:anImage tag:0];
		self.tabBarItem = theItem;
		[theItem release];
	}
	return self;
}

I hope this helps someone else avoid a day long confusion spree like me. Thanks to everyone who was thinking about helping on this one, and thanks to everyone who helps on this site. It is always a big help for me.