RBStoryboardLink

DEPRECATED

With Apple's recent release of iOS 9 and Xcode 7, linking storyboards has become a natively-supported workflow. I don't know, but I certainly hope the community's large interest in RBStoryboardLink played a role in this change to Interface Builder. I appreciate all the ideas and contributions that have come from the community. RBStoryboardLink started its life simply as a proof-of-concept, and it became far more popular than imagined.

Since I work almost exclusively with the latest version of iOS, it's becoming harder for me to maintain RBStoryboardLink. This repository will remain available for anyone who needs to work with iOS 8 and earlier. There are also many forks available (120 at the time of this writing). It's sad to deprecate my most popular GitHub project, but it's wonderful that it's replaced by an officially-supported option. Thank you again for all the community support.

Summary

RBStoryboardLink started out as a proof-of-concept and that is still largely the case. It may not work in all cases. Furthermore, RBStoryboardLink should not be used without first understanding storyboards.

UIStoryboards are very powerful and useful. However, to make the best use of storyboards, they need to be broken down into natural modules. The problem with having many storyboards is writing the code to transition between them. RBStoryboardLink solves this problem by allowing "pseudo-segues" between UIStoryboards. These segues can be built without leaving Interface Builder and without writing any extra code.

Dependencies

RBStoryboardLink requires iOS 7.0+. With some modifications it can support iOS 6 as well, but I wanted to keep it simple. RBStoryboardLink cannot simultaneously support iOS 5 and 7 due to the large functionality differences.

How to use

NOTE: As of 0.1.0, there is a new workflow. The old workflow only used RBStoryboardLink. It was responsible for all the work by acting as a proxy for the real view controller. In the new workflow, RBStoryboardLink merely provides information for RBStoryboardSegue. RBStoryboardSegue redirects the segue on presentation. This redirection avoids the complexity of UIViewController containment and dereferencing a proxy in methods such as -prepareForSegue:sender:. The new workflow is thanks to @MBulli.

1. Your app's storyboards must first be decomposed into their natural modules. See this guide for some tips.

2. Where ever you want create a transition into a different storyboard, create a UIViewController representing the scene to be pushed.

3. Create the desired segue type (Push, Modal, Custom) to these surrogate view controllers. To take advantage of the new linking, set the type to custom and choose one of RBStoryboardPushSegue, RBStoryboardModalSegue, or RBStoryboardPopoverSegue. You may also create subclasses of RBStoryboardSegue for custom transitions.

4. In the Identity Inspector, change the class type of each surrogate view controller to RBStoryboardLink.

5. While still in the Identity Inspector, add one or more User Defined Runtime Attributes.

   1. storyboardName (Required) The name of the storyboard to transition into.
   2. sceneIdentifier (Optional) The identifier of the view controller to transition to. If left blank, this will push the first view controller.
   3. needsTopLayoutGuide (Optional) Whether a custom layout constraint should be added to the top layout guide in storyboards. If you notice the background of your navigation bar not getting behind the status bar, set this to NO. This property is unused if using one of the RBStoryboardSegues.
   4. needsBottomLayoutGuide (Optional) Same as the one on top, but for the bottom guide. This property is unused if using one of the RBStoryboardSegues.

Implementation notes

• When using a UITabBarController with UINavcontrollers in the tabs. Place the UINavigationControllers in the same storyboard as the UITabBarController.

Demos

There are two demos that are provided to show how to use RBStoryboardLink:

• A standard, straightforward workflow.

• A tabbed workflow.

Contribution

Contributions are welcomed. I'm much more responsive to pull requests rather than issues. The sample apps use KIF for automated testing. Any pull requests must pass the tests before they will be merged. If new functionality is introduced, the pull requests must also add tests for the new behavior. If you want to contribute and don't know what to tackle, take a look at the issues list.

License

RBStoryboardLink is licensed under the MIT license, which is reproduced in its entirety here:

Copyright (c) 2012-2015 Robert Brown

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.