UIView subclass with its own XIB [duplicate]

ThomasM,

We had similar ideas about encapsulating behavior inside a custom view (say, a slider with companion labels for min/max/current values, with value-changed events also handled by the control internally).

In our current best-practice, we would design the ShareView in Interface Builder (ShareView.xib), as described by Eimantas in his answer. We then embed the ShareView to the view hierarchy in MainViewController.xib.

I wrote up how we embed custom-view Nibs inside other Nibs in our iOS developer blog. The crux is overriding -awakeAfterUsingCoder: in your custom view, replacing the object loaded from MainViewController.xib with the one loaded from the “embedded” Nib (ShareView.xib).

Something along these lines:

// ShareView.m
- (id) awakeAfterUsingCoder:(NSCoder*)aDecoder {
    BOOL theThingThatGotLoadedWasJustAPlaceholder = ([[self subviews] count] == 0);
    if (theThingThatGotLoadedWasJustAPlaceholder) {
        // load the embedded view from its Nib
        ShareView* theRealThing = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:NSStringFromClass([ShareView class]) owner:nil options:nil] objectAtIndex:0];

        // pass properties through
        theRealThing.frame = self.frame;
        theRealThing.autoresizingMask = self.autoresizingMask;

        [self release];
        self = [theRealThing retain];
    }
    return self;
}