UIPageViewController: return the current visible view

How do you know what is the current page/view displayed inside an UIPageViewController?

I have overridden the viewDidAppear method of my child views, so that they send an id to the parent view in their viewDidAppear method.

However, the problem is this: i cannot reliably use that id as id for the displayed page. because if the user turns the page but halfway through decides to stop the turning and put the page back, viewDidAppear will already have been called. (the view is visible behind the curled page).

Maybe i should only switch to a new id if the current view disappears. But I wonder if there is not a more simple way to return the view that is currently visible?

Solution 1:

You should manually keep track of the current page.

The delegate method pageViewController:didFinishAnimating:previousViewControllers:transitionCompleted: will tell you when to update that variable. The last argument of the method transitionCompleted: can tell you whether a user completed a page turn transition or not.

Then, you can get the currently presented View Controller by doing

self.viewControllers?.first

Solution 2:

As of iOS 6 I've found that the viewControllers property of UIPageViewController constantly updates so that it will always hold the one view controller that represents the current page, and nothing else. Thus, you can access the current page by calling viewControllers[0] (Assuming you only show one view controller at a time).

The viewController array only updates once the page "locks" into place, so if a user decides to partially reveal the next page it doesn't become the "current" page unless they complete the transition.

If you want to keep track of the "page numbers" assign your view controllers an index value as you create them through the UIPageViewController datasource methods.

So for example:

-(void)autoAdvance
    {
    UIViewController *currentVC = self.viewControllers[0];
    NSUInteger currentIndex = [myViewControllers indexOfObject:currentVC];

    if ( currentIndex >= (myViewControllers.count-1) ) return;

    [self setViewControllers:@[myViewControllers[ currentIndex+1 ]]
        direction:UIPageViewControllerNavigationDirectionForward
        animated:YES
        completion:nil];
    }
-(NSInteger)presentationIndexForPageViewController:
                         (UIPageViewController *)pageViewController
    {
    // return 0;
    UIViewController *currentVC = self.viewControllers[0];
    NSUInteger currentIndex = [myViewControllers indexOfObject:currentVC];
    return currentIndex;
    }

But note the comments that this is unreliable.