UISearchDisplayController with no results tableView?

user_44014 0
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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?

searchdisplaycontroller uisearchbar objective-c iphone
10 Answers

it should be sufficient to implement the following method in your UISearchDisplayDelegate (which usually is your custom UITableViewController subclass)

- (BOOL) searchDisplayController: (UISearchDisplayController *) controller shouldReloadTableForSearchString: (NSString *) searchString
{
    [self startMyCustomWebserviceSearchAsBackgroundProcessForString: searchString]; //starts new NSThread
    return NO; 
}

have you tried this?

user_1485940
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