Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

Dismissing a Popover

An important feature of a popover’s configuration is whether and to what extent the user can operate outside it without automatically dismissing it. There are two aspects to this configuration:

UIPopoverController’s passthroughViews property

This is an array of views in the interface behind the popover; the user can interact with these views while the popover is showing. What happens if the user taps a view that is not listed in the passthroughViews array depends on the modalInPopover property.

UIViewController’s modalInPopover property

If this is YES for the popover controller’s view controller (or for its current child view controller, as in a tab bar interface or navigation interface), then if the user taps outside the popover on a view not listed in the popover controller’s passthroughViews, nothing at all happens.

If it is NO (the default), then if the user taps outside the popover on a view not listed in the popover controller’s passthroughViews, the view tapped on is unaffected, and the popover is dismissed.

Warning

The claim made by the documentation (and by previous editions of this book) that modalInPopover prevents all user interaction outside a popover is wrong. The user can still interact with a view listed in the passthroughViews even if modalInPopover is YES.

You should pay attention to the passthroughViews, as the default behavior may be undesirable. For example, if a popover is summoned by the user tapping a UIBarButton item in a toolbar using ...