iOS 7 Programming Cookbook

1.5. Picking the Date and Time with UIDatePicker

Problem

You want to allow the users of your app to select a date and time using an intuitive and ready-made user interface.

Solution

Use the UIDatePicker class.

Discussion

UIDatePicker is very similar to the UIPickerView class. The date picker is in fact a prepopulated picker view. A good example of the date picker control is in the Calendar app on the iPhone (Figure 1-13).

Figure 1-13. A date picker shown at the center of the screen

Let’s get started by first declaring a property of type UIDatePicker. Then we’ll allocate and initialize this property and add it to the view of our view controller:

#import "ViewController.h"

@interface ViewController ()
@property (nonatomic, strong) UIDatePicker *myDatePicker;
@end

@implementation ViewController

...

And now let’s instantiate the date picker, as planned:

- (void)viewDidLoad{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    self.myDatePicker = [[UIDatePicker alloc] init];
    self.myDatePicker.center = self.view.center;
    [self.view addSubview:self.myDatePicker];
}

Now let’s run the app and see how it looks in Figure 1-14.

Figure 1-14. A simple date picker

You can see that the date picker, by default, has picked today’s date. The first thing that we need to know about date pickers is that they can have different styles or modes. This ...