Prevent a UISearchDisplayController from hiding the navigation bar

Question

Whenever a user begins editing a UISearchDisplayController's search bar, the search controller becomes active and hides the view's navigation bar while presenting the search table view. Is it possible to prevent a UISearchDisplayController from hiding the navigation bar without reimplementing it?

Answer 1

I just debugged a bit into UISearchDisplayController and found that it's calling a private method on UINavigationController to hide the navigation bar. This happens in -setActive:animated:. If you subclass UISearchDisplayController and overwrite this method with the following code you can prevent the navigationBar from being hidden by faking it to be already hidden.

- (void)setActive:(BOOL)visible animated:(BOOL)animated;
{
    if(self.active == visible) return;
    [self.searchContentsController.navigationController setNavigationBarHidden:YES animated:NO];
    [super setActive:visible animated:animated];
    [self.searchContentsController.navigationController setNavigationBarHidden:NO animated:NO];
    if (visible) {
        [self.searchBar becomeFirstResponder];
    } else {
        [self.searchBar resignFirstResponder];
    }   
}

Let me know if this works for you. I also hope this won't break in future iOS versions... Tested on iOS 4.0 only.