How to load a xib file in a UIView

I have been searching everywhere and nothing so far has worked for me.

Basically I want to have a .xib file called rootView.xib and inside it I want to have a UIView (lets call it containerView) that takes up only half of the screen (so there would be the regular view and a new view). Then I want a different .xib file called firstView.xib and load it inside of containerView. So I can have a bunch of stuff on firstView.xib and a bunch of different stuff in rootView.xib and load my firstView.xib inside of containerView in rootView.xib but since it only takes up half of the screen you would still see the stuff on rootView.xib

To get an object from a xib file programatically you can use: [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"MyXibName" owner:self options:nil] which returns an array of the top level objects in the xib.

So, you could do something like this:

UIView *rootView = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"MyRootView" owner:self options:nil] objectAtIndex:0];
UIView *containerView = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"MyContainerView" owner:self options:nil] lastObject];
[rootView addSubview:containerView];
[self.view addSubview:rootView];

I created a sample project on github to load a UIView from a .xib file inside another .xib file. Or you can do it programmatically.

This is good for little widgets you want to reuse on different UIViewController objects.

1. New Approach: https://github.com/PaulSolt/CustomUIView
2. Original Approach: https://github.com/PaulSolt/CompositeXib

You could try:

UIView *firstViewUIView = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"firstView" owner:self options:nil] firstObject];
[self.view.containerView addSubview:firstViewUIView];