Adding an image to a UIView / UIView initWithFrame

In my most recent project, I created a tab bar application. The default tab bar application in XCode is set up oddly compared to normal applications in that you're not working with XIBs and view controllers, but only XIBs (to begin with).

In retrospect, I think I should have created a UIView within each XIN through interface builder and then a UIViewController for each of those. However, I skipped the whole model-view-controller thing and created m files that inherited from UIView. I directed the XIBs to inherit from my explicit UIViews.

This method worked perfectly fine until I wanted to dynamically load a background image into each of those UIViews. I didn't want to apply the images in interface builder because I had already placed all my controls and I didn't feel like removing them all. I turned to Google...

self.view.backgroundColor = [[UIColor alloc] initWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"yourimage.png"]];

I stripped off the "view" part because I'm writing a UIView rather than a UIViewController to get:

self.backgroundColor = [[UIColor alloc] initWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"yourimage.png"]];

I added this to the XCode generated method in each of my UIView files called "initWithFrame". The method has a section betwixt an if-statement where it directs you to place initialization code. Bingo.

But, it didn't work. Apparently, UIViews don't call initWithFrame upon initialization (or at all?); they call initWithCoder. The solution is to create a the initWithCoder method like so:

- (id)initWithCoder:(NSCoder*)coder {
    if (self = [super initWithCoder:coder]) {
        self.backgroundColor = [[UIColor alloc] initWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"yourimage.png"]];
    }
    return self;
}