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in my app I want to have a searchbar like in the weather app when you add a new city. I also want to search for citys/places with google geocoding and parse the results I already knkow how to do that works perfect. for this actually I have two questions.

first how do I create a searchbar that looks like the one in the weather app or the stokes app? a normal searchbar does not have a topic which i can work with. How did they do that ?

and second how can I become that instant/live search feeling? I mean that when you start typing it starts searching for what you typed in, kind a like for every letter you type it does a new search and presents data after a short while when you stopped typing. I cant do a query for every letter typed in, that would cause too much traffic and would take too long I guess.

BObereder
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2 Answers2

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Create window based project, drop a view, drop a UISearchBar, drop a view on top of the search bar, make it rectangular, and you have a search bar with a topic. Then you have to implement the UISearchBarDelegate protocol so for each editing you look up the city names on a dictionary that you previously preloaded (or from internet directly) and perform a table insert if there is any matches. You can try to match the exact names, or use the levenshtein distance.

Probably you only want live results after a delay so do

[NSObject cancelPreviousPerformRequestsWithTarget:self];
[self performSelector:@selector(fillMyTableWithResults) withObject:nil afterDelay:1.0];

in the textDidChange method of the delegate.

Jano
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  • guess you mean a lable on top of the searchbar right ? guess I have to do that programmatically cause IB does not let me place a label on top of the searchbar. sry I am kind of new to iphone development! I definitely want to load the data via google geocoding so my problem is I guess I cant do a query for every letter changed ? – BObereder May 20 '11 at 08:19
  • It may let you add a UILabel or a UIImageView without any programming if you add a UIView, the UISearchBar as a child (move it below it until it becomes a child node), and the label as a child of the UIView. In other words, the label is not a child or part of the bar, even when it looks so. With the code I posted above, you can select the delay, 1.0 or whatever so it only searches when the user stops writing. – Jano May 20 '11 at 08:31
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Have you looked at UISearchDisplayController. Take a look at this example.

EDIT Caching previous results is something that you can consider but without sending a request, you can end up showing stale data. While I haven't actually tried it out, I think the Three20 framework as it is built with the idea of web as a data source. It also has an equivalent TTSearchDisplayController. You can see if it helps.

Deepak Danduprolu
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