Create UIPickerView programmatically

The UIPickerView is one of the input controls in iOS for displaying and selecting a list of data. Most tutorials implement this control in Interface Builder, which is fine, but I like to have more control and do most everything in code. There are several components to doing this 100% programmatically, which I will demonstrate below...

The first thing we have to do is include the UIPickerViewDelegate in the interface of our class .h file.

@interface myViewController : UIViewController<UIPickerViewDelegate>

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Creating UIViews programmatically

If you want to create a new UIViewController object without using a Nib file in Interface Builder, you must use the loadView method. It's rather simple, but key to doing things programmatically.

- (void)loadView {
 CGRect viewFrame;
 viewFrame = CGRectMake(0, 0, MASTER_WIDTH, MASTER_HEIGHT);
 self.view = [[[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:viewFrame] autorelease];
}

(Note: MASTER_WIDTH and MASTER_HEIGHT are simply constants defining the width and height of the screen.)

Once your view is created, you are free to implement, as usual, viewDidLoad, viewWillAppear, viewDidAppear, etc.