Help with MenuController about samples

[daniel-jonathan]

Hey, I am happy that you are enjoying Material :) Thank you.

Yes, I can help. A little explanation of how to think of the navigation controllers in general (ToolbarController, MenuController, NavigationDrawerController, etc...) should help you.

The main idea is to provide flexibility in architecting your application. The first concept to understand is the layering system for navigation controls. You can layer the order in which you stack the navigation controllers, so that you can control your application's flow more easily. With the layering system, accessing the parent navigation controls is done through the optional helper accessor properties, such as: menuController?..., navigationDrawerController?..., etc...

So now that we have a layering system, we can decide to populate the navigation controllers, MenuController in your case, in different subview controllers. You have the choice of adding the MenuController at a high level, application wide, and then only revealing it and adding buttons from a view controller that appears within the hierarchy, for example SearchMenuItemsViewController.

Things to consider, that you cannot access the helper optional accessory properties for navigation controllers in the viewDidLoad method when you create the object and then add it as the rootViewController, like so:

searchMenuVC = SearchMenuViewController(rootViewController: SearchMenuItemsViewController())

The reason being is that the relationship, parent-child, is not yet established resulting in a nil value when using the helper accessory properties. So you need to access it in the viewWillAppear, or viewDidAppear method.

Setting the delegate can always change when you are introducing new view controllers, allowing you to reuse the same application wide navigation controller, which would require some planning to ensure you don't try and double bind a delegation object, much easier to do than it may sound.

Lack in response to clicking buttons is when you have set the handlers in a view controller that is then removed from the view hierarchy, so the handlers are no longer available. In this case, you would probably want to place the handlers in an object, or view controller that is always alive, such as a subclass of the navigation controller type itself, like AppMenuController.

Also please update to Material 2.3.12 as I pushed updates specifically for the MenuController and animations in iOS 8, 9, and 10.

Any questions so far?

[codemodouk]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the quick and detailed response.

I think I understand from your explanation that the menuController property is available across sub view controllers to be used as required by those sub VCs.

What I don't understand, is where you would create it in a Storyboard based app. Sorry if I didn't make this clear in my initial post. My Storyboard setup uses a uitabbarcontroller as the initial view controller. One of the controllers on the tab bar controller needs to access and use the menuController property.

In the the sample app the MenuController sub class is instantiated in the app delegate, and made the rootViewController for the window. In my case, the rootViewController for the window is defined in the storyboard. So where do I instantiate my MenuController subclass?

I feel I'm missing something very obvious, so, I apologise if this sounds a bit basic. If I can assist further to help clarify my situation more please let me know.

Thanks again
Alex

[codemodouk]

Hi Daniel,

A nights sleep makes everything much clearer! I've got my head around this now, and I'm able to move on. Please feel free to close the issue.

Thank you for your support.

Regards
Alex

[daniel-jonathan]

Awesome :) Feel free to reach out anytime, we are here to help.