Changing the UIBackButtonItem title

Question

I have a navigationController-based app. I want to change the title of the back button for the root view controller. I have tried the following code in the rootViewControlle

Answer 1

As a previous poster (Brenden) mentioned, by default the value of backBarButtonItem is nil, so setting its title results in sending a message to a nil object which of course gets ignored.

If you don't want to muck around with manually creating a new button in order to set its title, there is a work around in Interface Builder.

In IB, for a given view controller that's part of a navigationController stack, you can click on the navigationItem representing the navigationBar. When you click, the properties inspector lets you set three properties: Title, Prompt and BackButton.

If, in the backButton field you type in any old random text, this has the effect of instantiating a backBarButtonItem object and in your code, you are now able to set its title to any text you want.

Hope this helps someone.