Order of UIViewController initialization and loading

Question

I\'m fairly new to UI programming on the Mac and iPhone, and I\'ve run across something that somewhat puzzles me.

A UIViewController has 3 methods that involve the i

Answer 1

The view loading system on the iPhone works like this:

When you initialize a view controller (either with -init or -initWithNibName:bundle:), it doesn't actually create and initialize the view. When you call -view for the first time, it calls -loadView. By default, -loadView just loads the view from the xib file (nibName). If you override this, though, you're responsible for creating the view and assigning it to the view controller's view property. As an example:

- (void)loadView
{
   UIView *view = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] applicationFrame]];
   // add subviews 
   self.view = view;
   [view release];
}

Every time you create the view, which is different from the view becoming visible and showing onscreen, it calls -viewDidLoad. (-viewDidAppear/-viewDidDisappear is for the visibility of the view on-screen)

Since we're already off-track, let's consider memory management. When the view is offscreen, the system will automatically set the view property of a view controller to nil. The problem is that all the subviews of that view are leaking. How so? Well, the retain count for each subview is 2 (views retain subviews, and your view controller has an outlet/ivar to it). When the view is nil, the retain count of that view is 1. It doesn't make sense for a view to stick around if a view isn't showing, so you set it to nil in -viewDidUnload (which is a hook for whenever the view is set to nil).