AddChildViewController and presentViewController

Question

iOS 5 introduces the concept of a custom container view controller and provides an API like addChildViewController . Question: can you add a view controller as a child and still use it with presentViewController ? Does this do the latter automatically, making it a child of the presentingViewController ?

Answer 1

This is not how it should be used.

The parent / child relationship refers to when the view manager has slaves that are controlled by their own view controllers, such as the UITabBarController, where the parent view controller draws tabs and child view controllers draw the contents of each tab.

If you are presenting a view controller using presentViewController, it usually takes over the entire screen or appears in modal mode, so that the view presentation controller no longer controls. In this scenario, there is no reason for the host to be a parent, because he does not need to cooperate with the presented controller - he simply gets out of the way until the presented controller is fired again.

Why did you want to do this? If it is so that view controllers have a link to each other and can pass data, there are other ways to do this (for example, a delegate template, NSNotifications, or even just a property linking the two).