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

I spent a lot of time with this, and ultimately the solution I went with is like @malhals's, but the amount of code is significantly reduced by using facebook's KVOController: https://github.com/facebook/KVOController . Another advantage here is that if your searchResultsController is a UINavigationController then you don't need to subclass it just to add @malhal's code.

// always show searchResultsController, even if text is empty
[self.KVOController observe:self.searchController.searchResultsController.view keyPath:@"hidden" options:NSKeyValueObservingOptionNew block:^(id observer, UIView* view, NSDictionary *change) {
    if ([change[NSKeyValueChangeNewKey] boolValue] == YES) {
        view.hidden = NO;
    }
}];
self.searchController.dimsBackgroundDuringPresentation = NO;