UITextField within UISearchBar in iOS 7

Question

I am trying to accomplish the same look of my UISearchBar with a TextField within it, as in my iOS 6 app. I have tried to code it in several ways and not yet been successful

Answer 1

You should not put a UITextField in the UINavigationBar in iOS 7, this widget is already provided by Apple.

In iOS 7, you can simply use a UISearchDisplayController with a UISearchBar, and set:

searchDisplayController.displaySearchBarInNavigationBar = YES

The search bar will appear in your UINavigationBar, and it will play nice with the other UIBarButtonItems without all the hacks and manual frame sizing in your original iOS 6 solution.

One thing to note - if you are going to add this to a project that still supports OSes older than iOS 7, you'll want to make sure that you put a check around the call or your app will crash when running on older OSes.

if([searchDisplayController respondsToSelector:@selector(displaysSearchBarInNavigationBar)])
{
    searchDisplayController.displaysSearchBarInNavigationBar = YES;
}

See this section of the iOS 7 transition guide: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/TransitionGuide/Bars.html

In iOS 7, UISearchDisplayController includes the displaysSearchBarInNavigationBar property, which you can use to put a search bar in a navigation bar, similar to the one in Calendar on iPhone:

One other note - you should consider migrating to AutoLayout going forward so you don't have to do all that tedious frame manipulation. Apple recommends it, and probably for good reason (future devices with larger screens...?)