No call to shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation when using custom TabBarController

Question

I have created a custom TabBarController that inherits from UIViewController (NOT UITabBarController because it is not intended for subclassing). Everything works fine except the orientation support.

My TabBarController is set as the rootViewController on my UIWindow and contains an internal array of UIViewControllers. In my case I have added UINavigationControllers as the root of each tab.

When pushing a new UIViewController to any of my UINavigationControllers in my TabBarController I get a call to shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation, this is all fine because here I can set which UIViewController should support which orientation (as described in the Apple documentation).

However when I go back by pressing the back button in my UINavigationBar I do not get a call to shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation hence the view we display will end up in the wrong orientation.

I have done a quick test by replacing my custom TabBarController with a UITabBarController and I get the call to shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation when pressing the back button so there must be something wrong here but I cannot figure out what.

Why don't I get the calls to shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation? Is the UITabBarController doing something I have missed?

Has anybody here experienced the same problem? Do you have any ideas that might be worth trying because I have run out of ideas.

EDIT

This issue is resolved by adding each UIViewController within the TabBarController as a child using the iOS5 container view controller.

Add the UIViewController as a child with this method: addChildViewController Then override automaticallyForwardAppearanceAndRotationMethodsToChildViewControllers and return YES.

Now you should get the shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation callbacks in your UIViewControllers

Answer 1

I have seen such problems before, and it always boiled down to adding the -shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation: method to all view controllers, not just the topmost one as you might expect.

(and if you're lazy, just add a category to UIViewController )