One UIViewController or Two for portrait / landscape views

Question

I am looking for some clarification with regards to view controllers and views. Should one view controller be used exclusively to control one view?

Basically, my portrait view is going to be a 4x3 grid of buttons (within a scrollview). When i rotate the view to landscape, i am going to want maybe a 6x4 grid.

Obviously the functionality for handling the buttons' clicks etc will be the same in either orientation, so it would seem a lot of effort to duplicate this for landscape.

How should i get the view controller to use the correct view xib?

Should i have two seperate xibs? I have tried every combination of autoresize masks and not having much luck.

I'm not sure of the correct way to go.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can also try to change your views and subviews sizes etc. Take a look here Madhup expained It before. Changing UIView on orientation change

Answer 2

i do not think that the above one answered the question of joec. joec want to know, if it is bad or good to have 2 nibs (i.e. landscape.nib and portrait.nib) and manage the views in that 2 nibs with 1 uiviewcontroller.

my understanding of the mvc design pattern is, that a ViewController really SHOULD manage different views. but when i look at the internet, in cause of cocoa touch, often people says that it is BAD (whatever this means) when a UIViewController switches his view-property at runtime. thats confusing to me. why should a viewcontroller not be able to switch views ? why should i build some strange "master"-viewcontroller, which manages 2 other viewcontrollers, and everyone of this manages his own view. in case of landscape and portrait abstraction (or i.e. iphone-gui and ipad-gui abstraction) the code in the gui-business-layer (the event-code etc. in the viewcontroller) is exactly the same for different views. the style of the views is not. so that should one of the benefits of a mvc-implementation.

sorry, but that seems not logical for me, apple.

any thoughts ?

edit says:

it seems that apple provides some strange sort of workaround to solve this problem (hate me, but for me it is nothing more than that, because i see no really straight-forward design implementation for managing and handling views in the UIViewController class):

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS/BasicViewControllers/BasicViewControllers.html%23//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007457-CH101-SW26

i found this link in the following stack overflow thread:

Want to use muliple nibs for different iphone interface orientations

thanks to Michal for that one.