Creating a reusable UIView with xib (and loading from storyboard)

Question

OK, there are dozens of posts on StackOverflow about this, but none are particularly clear on the solution. I\'d like to create a custom UIView with an accompan

Answer 1

Your problem is calling loadNibNamed: from (a descendant of) initWithCoder:. loadNibNamed: internally calls initWithCoder:. If you want to override the storyboard coder, and always load your xib implementation, I suggest the following technique. Add a property to your view class, and in the xib file, set it to a predetermined value (in User Defined Runtime Attributes). Now, after calling [super initWithCoder:aDecoder]; check the value of the property. If it is the predetermined value, do not call [self initializeSubviews];.

So, something like this:

-(instancetype)initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)aDecoder {
    self = [super initWithCoder:aDecoder];

    if (self && self._xibProperty != 666)
    {
        //We are in the storyboard code path. Initialize from the xib.
        self = [self initializeSubviews];

        //Here, you can load properties that you wish to expose to the user to set in a storyboard; e.g.:
        //self.backgroundColor = [aDecoder decodeObjectOfClass:[UIColor class] forKey:@"backgroundColor"];
    }

    return self;
}

-(instancetype)initializeSubviews {
    id view =   [[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:NSStringFromClass([self class]) owner:self options:nil] firstObject];

    return view;
}