UIDevice currentDevice's "orientation" always null

Question

As per the title. Calling [[UIDevice currentDevice] BeginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications] has no effect.

DidRotateToInterfaceOrientation etc events are working fine, but I need to be able to poll the device orientation arbitrarily.

How can I fix/do this?

The long story: I have a tab application with a navigation controller on each tab. The root view of tab number one is a graph that goes full screen when the orientation changes to landscape; however this needs to be checked whenever the view appears as the orientation change could have occurred elsewhere, so I was hoping to poll the orientation state whenever this view appears.

Liking

Answer 1

UIDevice's notion of orientation seems to be only available on actual devices. The simulator seems to always return 0 here, regardless of whether the notifications have been enabled as the docs suggest. Irritatingly inconvenient, but there you go.

I find this works fine on the actual device:

    [[UIDevice currentDevice] beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];
    NSLog(@"orientation: %d", [[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation]);
    [[UIDevice currentDevice] endGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications];

Consortium

Yep, just wasted 2h trying to figure out what was wrong but indeed it was just the simulator. All working fine on the device. – Jaredjarek

[[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation] does not work if the user has locked his device orientation from the Springboard. orientation is always the last value, and there are no notifications for changes. – Spae

UIDeviceOrientation interfaceOrientation = [UIApplication sharedApplication].statusBarOrientation; this alternative worked for me – Similar

Answer 2

seems like a silly question, but isn't it

beginGeneratingDeviceOrientationNotifications

( lower case b ) ...

Purity

Answer 3

If you check [[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation] in - (void)viewDidLoad you will always get nil.

Check it in *- (void) viewDidAppear:(BOOL)*animated method and you

Stylo

"...you will always get nil". Is this documented? – Alto

Answer 4

this is as per iMeMyself said in the comments above - this samed me a lot of time and I think is the right answer so I wanted to highlight it here:

UIDeviceOrientation interfaceOrientation = [UIApplication sharedApplication].statusBarOrientation;

if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(interfaceOrientation))
{
   //do stuff here
}
else if (UIInterfaceOrientationIsPortrait(interfaceOrientation))
{
//or do stuff here
}

Trygve

this worked for me, but shouldnt it be UIInterfaceOrientation interfaceOrientation=[.... ? – Diaz

Answer 5

Wouldn't [[UIDevice currentDevice] orientation] give you the current orientation state? You could check for this in your viewWillAppear method of the view controller that wants to poll.

Edit: Other than that, there are various ways to get the current orientation, such as using the statusBarOrientation property in UIApplication, or interfaceOrientation property in UIViewcontroller.

Cordeliacordelie

Looks like you didn't read the question. He's saying that method is returning NULL even though he's calling beginGeneratingOrientationNotifications. – Kishakishinev