Loading a Nib file, Programmatically (Objective-C)

If you want to load a Nib file at run time by simply allocating and initializing a View object, then you should take a rather strange approach to how you create your class files. Suppose you have a subclass of UIView called MyView and what you want is to allocate and initialize an instance of MyView but have MyView load its outlets and actions from a Nib file. Well, you will need to do two things:

1) In Interface Builder, change the class name of your View object to MyView.


2) Then you will have to override MyView's initWithFrame method like so:

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)paramFrame
{
    
    NSArray *arrayOfViews = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"MyView"
                                                          owner:nil
                                                        options:nil];
    
    if ([arrayOfViews count] < 1){
        [self release];
        return nil;
    }
    
    MyView *newView = [[arrayOfViews objectAtIndex:0] retain];
    [newView setFrame:paramFrame];
    
    [self release];
    self = newView;
    
    return self;
    
}

Then you can go ahead and initialize your view like this:

MyView *myView = [[MyView alloc] initWithFrame:self.view.bounds];
[self.view addSubview:myView];
[myView release];

And here an instance of MyView will get added to the view of a view controller. That simple. I hope it helps some of you out there :-)