UIViewController into a UITabBar

[Anthony]

Maybe I'm overlooking something but i've gone through the framework and can't seem to find anything that would allow me to add UIViewController to a UITabBar. Is this currently not possible?

[Stephen Radford]

Not currently and I'm not sure if it's possible when merging TVML and UIKit. If your root views are UIKit you could choose to use a storyboard with a UITabBarController.

[Anthony]

What about the reverse. Could Kitchen present a recipe within a UIViewController, essentially a subview? If so then I could build the tabs with UIKit and add a recipe as a subview.

[Stephen Radford]

Not currently. It will be pushed as a view onto the main app navigation controller so will be presented as a new view not a child view of the tab.

Agree that one of these options is definitely desirable.

[Toshihiro Suzuki]

Yes, that's tvOS SDK's limitation.
If you're using Native TabBarController, I could present an empty child ViewController which opens TVML template via Kitchen. As mentioned, TVML is presented as a sibling of TabView, not a subview anymore. You have to hit the Menu button of Remote to go back to the TabBarController scene.
I ended up a little complex state handling, but it works.

    // MARK: - Lifecycle
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        /// first time
        presentTVML()
    }

    override func viewWillAppear(animated: Bool) {
        super.viewWillAppear(animated)
        if canPresentView {
            presentTVML()
        }
    }

    override func viewWillDisappear(animated: Bool) {
        super.viewWillDisappear(animated)
        canPresentView = true
    }

    private func presentTVML() {
        canPresentView = false
        Kitchen.serve(xmlFile: "Sample.tvml", type: .Modal)
    }

The UI transition looks ... not too bad, but not sure if it's okay for Apple's review guideline.

[Anthony]

I'll have to give that a shot. Im a bit stuck at what I should do as I need to implement searching and UISearchController is the best choice as using TVML for search wouldn't quite work as there isn't a way to dynamically update the XML with the results, let alone grab the text from the searchField

[Toshihiro Suzuki]

Apple's TVMLCatalog sample code actually demonstrates dynamic view manipulating in Search template, using TVJS.
https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/tvos/samplecode/TVMLCatalog/Introduction/Intro.html

I think we can consider that control as built-in Recipe in Kitchen. I'll take a look.😉

[Anthony]

That would be fantastic! Thanks!

[Toshihiro Suzuki]

SearchRecipe has been added in #56.

[Toshihiro Suzuki]

Closing this topic 🍳