UISearchDisplayController with no results tableView?

Zargony picture Zargony · Jul 31, 2009 · Viewed 25.9k times · Source

Usually, a UISearchDisplayController, when activated, dims the tableView and focuses the searchBar. As soon as you enter text into the searchBar, it creates a searchResultsTableView that displays between the searchBar and the keyboard. The searchDisplayController's delegate gets called when this second UITableView is loaded/shown/hidden/unloaded. Usually it shows live search results or autocompletion entries while typing.

In my app, I want to search a webservice and I don't want to call the webservice for each letter the user enters. Therefore, I want to entirely disable the searchResultsTableView and keep the dimmed black overlay while he enters text. I would then trigger the search (with a loading screen) once he hits the search button.

Just returning zero rows for the searchResultsTableView doesn't look nice since it displays an empty searchResultsTableView with a "no results" message. I tried to hide the table when it appears (searchDisplayController:didLoadSearchResultsTableView:) which works, but the blacked dimmed overlay is also hidden so that the underlying tableView is completely visible again.

Any ideas besides recreating the UISearchDisplayController functionality from scratch?

Answer

user182820 picture user182820 · Oct 2, 2009

here is a little trick that i just figured out and also you have to return 0 results while editing searchstring

- (BOOL)searchDisplayController:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller shouldReloadTableForSearchString:(NSString *)searchString
{
    savedSearchTerm = searchString;

    [controller.searchResultsTableView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithWhite:0.0 alpha:0.8]];
    [controller.searchResultsTableView setRowHeight:800];
    [controller.searchResultsTableView setScrollEnabled:NO];
    return NO;
}

- (void)searchDisplayController:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller didHideSearchResultsTableView:(UITableView *)tableView
{
    // undo the changes above to prevent artefacts reported below by mclin
}

i think you'll figure out what to do next