How to add a Toolbar in UINavigationController

A toolbar is a UI that provides convenient access to frequently used actions relevant to the current view.

The location and appearance might vary based on the platform.

For iOS, a toolbar appears at the bottom of a screen.

In this article, I will show you how easy it is to add a toolbar on a view controller in UIKit.

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How to Show a Toolbar in UINavigationController

You need to do three things to add a toolbar to any view controller.

1. A view controller must be in a UINavigationController.
2. On a view controller, set toolbar items in the toolbarItem property.
3. Show a toolbar by calling setToolbarHidden(_:animated:) on a navigation controller.

Navigation Controller

UINavigationController is a container view with many built-in components and features, e.g., a navigation bar, the ability to push and pop view controller, and a toolbar is also one of those built-in features.

To show a toolbar, we need to embed a view controller into a UINavgationController.

Set toolbar items

As we learned earlier, a toolbar is a place for actions related to a specific view.

That's why every UIViewController got a toolbarItem property, a property to hold toolbar items associated with the view controller.

We assign an array of items (UIBarButtonItem) that you want to show to toolbarItem.

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    toolbarItems = [
        UIBarButtonItem(systemItem: .action),
        UIBarButtonItem(systemItem: .flexibleSpace),
        UIBarButtonItem(systemItem: .trash)
    ]
}

In this case, I leave the UIBarButtonItem's actions blank for brevity.

Show a toolbar

Even though a navigation controller has built-in support to show a toolbar, it is hidden by default.

To show it, we set setToolbarHidden(false, animated: false) on a navigation controller.

In this example, we set this property from a view controller.

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    toolbarItems = [
        UIBarButtonItem(systemItem: .action),
        UIBarButtonItem(systemItem: .flexibleSpace),
        UIBarButtonItem(systemItem: .trash)
    ]

    navigationController?.setToolbarHidden(false, animated: false)
}

We can add a toolbar to a view controller with a few lines of code.