UINavigationController Interactive Pop Gesture Not Working?

Question

So I have a navigation controller in my built for iOS 7 app. The titleView is visible, as well as the back button and navigation bar its self. For some reason, the interactive pop gesture (swipe from the left edge) isn't working. Nothing happens. When I log the gesture, it is not nil. Is there anything special I have to do to enable this functionality? What could cause it not to work?

Answer 1

I have found that when using custom back buttons, the interactive pop gesture stops working (my take is that Apple cannot foresee how your custom back button will behave, so they disable the gesture).

To fix this, as other mentioned before, you can set the interactivePopGestureRecognizer.delegate property to nil.

In Swift, this can easily be done across your entire application by adding an extension for UINavigationController like this:

extension UINavigationController {

    override public func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        interactivePopGestureRecognizer?.delegate = nil
    }

}

Updated answer

Seems like setting the delegate to nil causes the app UI to freeze in some scenarios (eg. when the user swipes left or right on the top view controller of the navigation stack).

Because gestureRecognizerShouldBegin delegate method cannot be handled in an extension, subclassing UINavigationController seems like the best solution:

class NavigationController: UINavigationController, UIGestureRecognizerDelegate {

    /// Custom back buttons disable the interactive pop animation
    /// To enable it back we set the recognizer to `self`
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        interactivePopGestureRecognizer?.delegate = self
    }

    func gestureRecognizerShouldBegin(gestureRecognizer: UIGestureRecognizer) -> Bool {
        return viewControllers.count > 1
    }

}