Dismissing a UIPopoverController from within its contentViewController?

Question

If you want to dismiss a popover -- for example, from a button within the popover's contentViewController you must --

Create a reference to the popover to be held by view controller which creates it
Create a notification from the contentViewController to let the owning view controller know that it should be dismissed, or alternately create a delegate for the same purpose
Send the notification or delegate message when the popover is ready to be dismissed
Call dismissPopover:animated when the notification or delegate method is called

Meanwhile, from a UIViewController you can access the modal view controller, the parent view controller, the navigation controller, the split view controller, the tab bar controller, the search display controller, the child view controllers, the presenting view controllers, and the presented view controllers.

Is there a better approach to do this from popover's contentViewController?

score 29 · Accepted Answer · edited Aug 03 '12 at 18:37

Unfortunately, you'll have to create a weak property reference to said UIPopoverController as there's no way to access it from within the content view controller.

I was surprised how UIViewControllers can access the modal view controller, the parent view controller, the navigation controller, the split view controller, the tab bar controller, the search display controller, and as of iOS 5, the child view controllers as well as presenting and presented controllers...but not the popover controller (granted popovers aren't UIViewControllers but still).

Technically, there's a private, undocumented method to retrieve the popoverController that the UIViewController is in...I have no idea why they never made it public given that it should be exactly the same as any of the above controllers.

Though even in the private, undocumented world, there's no equivalent to dismissModalViewcontrollerAnimated:. You'll still have to get that reference then dismiss it that way.

After searching through the docs I was surprised by this as well. Unfortunately this adds unwanted dependencies throughout. — Maurizio, Apr 19 '12 at 14:38
In iOS8, you can have a choice now: self.popoverPresentationController — LiangWang, Apr 21 '15 at 23:26

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '14 at 13:29

Another way to solve this is to create an abstract view controller (for all your view controllers) that adds an NSNotification observer to a method such as -(void)closePopoverIfNecessary:(NSNotification*)notification and have child classes optionally implement the method to close their popover(s) if open. Then from within the popover's controller you fire the notification to close it. You could also pass other info via the notification (userInfo) if needed.

This way there's no need for the parent references.

With this don't forget to remove observers in the abstract controller's `dealloc` — David James, Mar 17 '14 at 13:32

Dismissing a UIPopoverController from within its contentViewController?

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