UITabBarController and rotation iOS6

Question

Happy Memorial Day for those in America!

I am new to iOS and Objective-C programming; a few weeks ago I inherited an iPad app-in-development that was being designed for iOS 5. I now have everything working except the rotation in iOS 6. I know that iPad apps should rotate to every orientation be default (which is what I want), yet mine does not. Everything rotates perfectly in iOS 5, and I can get my splash screen to rotate perfectly in iOS 6, but that is all. I cannot get the activities (once you click through the splash screen) to rotate properly.

I have searched stackoverflow and other websites to figure out what I must do, so I know to implement -(BOOL)shouldAutorotate and -(NSUInteger)supportedInterfaceOrientations in any specific ViewController to control that view's orientation behavior. I've read that having that different rotation behavior in one VC can affect the entire app. So I made sure that every VC that I could find** would now implement those two iOS 6 methods to return YES and UIInterfaceOrientationMaskAll, respectively. That didn't work. I read about returning self.tabBarController.shouldAutorotate and self.tabBarController.supportedInterfaceOrientations in those methods to ensure that the tabbar rotation behavior is consistent, but that didn't work. I have read about implementing a category (UITabBarController+autoRotate.m and .h) that implements these two methods, and that didn't work. I have read about subclassing the tabBarController, and I think my code does that: in my appDelegate, I call

[myWindow setRootViewController:activityViewController],

where activityViewController is an instance of class BicycleFamilyAcitivityViewController, which is from

@interface BicycleFamilyActivityViewController : UIViewController <UITabBarControllerDelegate>

When I investigate what is being called during the successful splash screen rotation using the iOS 6 simulator, I notice that those two implemented methods in BicycleFamilyAcitivityViewController are being called (twice each, actually) and that -(void)willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation:duration is as well. When I try to rotate while viewing an activity (after clicking through the splash screen), those two methods are only called once, and -(void)willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation:duration is not called. In both instances, the appDelegate's -(NSUInteger)application:supportedInterfaceOrientationsForWindow method is called.

Any advice on how to get rotation to work throughout the entire app? Even if it's just pointing to an answer on StackOverflow that I haven't yet seen (or fully understood), I would be most grateful.

Many thanks in advance!

Bernie

** In looking for VC classes in the project, I made sure to consider any class that implemented the rotation method of iOS 5: -(BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:interfaceOrientation

Answer 1

Someone in-house figured out the problem. I thought I would post the answer to help anyone who has a similar predicament.

What I had tried (among other things) was: setting the UIWindow in my appDelegate class to be my instance of a subclass (BicycleFamilyAcitivityViewController) of UIViewController. In my appDelegate, I had:

[myWindow setRootViewController:activityViewController];

where activityViewController is an instance of a subclass of UIViewController.

But I should have created an additional UIWindow via delegate, then assign the TabBarController (tbc) as it's root VC when I build my TabBarController. In my primary view controller class, I had a buildTabBarController function. So these two lines in that function allowed my rotation to work:

UIWindow *keyWindow = [[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate] window];
[keyWindow setRootViewController:tbc];

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

In iOS 6 the Orientation functions have changed. Your set up should look like this in your viewControllers:

-(NSUInteger)supportedInterfaceOrientations {
    return UIInterfaceOrientationMaskAll;
}

-(UIInterfaceOrientation)preferredInterfaceOrientationForPresentation {
    return UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight;
}

-(BOOL)shouldAutorotate {
    return TRUE;
}

UIInterfaceOrientationMaskAll is all orientations, more information here.