How to add a Toolbar in UINavigationController
Table of Contents
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.
- A view controller must be in a
UINavigationController
. - On a view controller, set toolbar items in the
toolbarItem
property. - 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.
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