如何为iOS应用创建自定义容器视图？

Question

I am starting out developing an iPad App, and I would like for there to be a toolbar bar at the top that will present different views beneath it as pictured below:

So when each button is pressed, the toolbar should remain in place and different view controller should present its view in that space. I read through Apples ViewController programming guide, and it seems like this is possible, but I just somehow didn't get the actual methods that I needed to get a view controller to display its view inside that bottom rectangle.

Is it reasonable to have a container view which manages the toolbar, and then creates a view controller to display a sub view within that lower rectangle?

EDIT:

I would like to do something along these lines:

-(IBAction)hitMapButton{
    MapViewController *mapView = [[MapViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"MapView" bundle:nil];
    [self addChildViewController:mapView];
    [mapView release];
}

But I can't figure out how to actually get the view to draw?

Answer 1

Search the Apple documentation with 'Creating a Tab Bar'. You'll find several documents: creating programmatically, creating with segue, etc. There are also a number of sample projects that you can view based on that search, for example 'Tabster' (an iPhone app that is a bit dated but will certainly help you - edit the target to be 'iPad').

You can get a working staring point by creating a new Xcode project and selecting 'Tabbed Application'

Note that the UITabBarController puts the tab bar at the bottom - if you are thinking about putting it at the top you should also read the 'User Experience Guidelines'