UISearchController: show results even when search bar is empty

Question

As I understand, the default behaviour of UISearchController is:

1. On tapping search bar, background is dimmed and \'cancel\' button is shown.

Answer 1

Updated for iOS 13

From iOS13, we got system API support for this behaviour. You can set the property showsSearchResultsController = true

For iOS 12 and below

I am recently working on UISearchController. I want to show search history in searchResultsController when search bar is empty. So searchResultsController needs to show up whenever UISearchController gets presented.

Here, I use another solution to make the searchResultsController always visible by overriding the hidden property in a custom view.

for example, my searchResultsController is a UITableViewController. I create a VisibleTableView as a subclass of UITableView, and then change the UITableView custom class of searchResultsController to VisibleTableView in xib or storyboard. This way, my searchResultsController will never be hidden by UISearchController.

The good things here:

1. Easier to implement than KVO.

2. No delay to show searchResultsController. Flipping the hidden flag in "updateSearchResults" delegate method works, but there is a delay to show the searchResultsController.

3. It does't reset the hidden flag, so there is no UI gap/jumping between hidden and visible.

Swift 3 sample code:

class VisibleTableView: UITableView {
override var isHidden: Bool {
    get {
        return false
    }
    set {
        // ignoring any settings
    }
}
}