Adding Navigation Bar Programmatically in iOS Using Swift

To add navigation bar programmatically we’ll go through a series of steps that are mentioned below. We’ll be doing this in ViewWillLayoutSubviews method of our viewController.

Getting the width of the current View.

let width = self.view.frame.width

Creating a navigation bar with the width of our current view and height of 44 px which is the default height of a navigation bar.

let navigationBar: UINavigationBar = UINavigationBar(frame: CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: width, height: 44))

Adding the newly created navigation bar to our view.

self.view.addSubview(navigationBar)

We can further extend this example to add a title and a button to our View. The complete result should look something like the class below.

class ViewController: UIViewController {
   override func viewWillLayoutSubviews() {
      let width = self.view.frame.width
      let navigationBar: UINavigationBar = UINavigationBar(frame: CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: width, height: 44))
      self.view.addSubview(navigationBar);
      let navigationItem = UINavigationItem(title: "Navigation bar")
      let doneBtn = UIBarButtonItem(barButtonSystemItem: UIBarButtonItem.SystemItem.done, target: nil, action: #selector(selectorX))
      navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = doneBtn
      navigationBar.setItems([navigationItem], animated: false)
   }
   override func viewDidLoad() {
      super.viewDidLoad()
   }
   @objc func selectorX() { }
}

When we execute this example our result should look like.