How to trap the back button event

Question

I have a UITableViewController that launches a UIViewController and I would like to trap whenever the back button is pressed in the child controller, which is the class that derives from 'UIViewController'. I can change the Back Button title but setting the target & action values when setting the backBarButtonItem seems to get ignored. What's a way to receiving some kind of notification that the Back button was tapped?

- (void)showDetailView 
{
    // How I'm creating & showing the detail controller
    MyViewController *controller = [[MyViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"MyDetailView" bundle:nil]; 

    UIBarButtonItem *backButton = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithTitle:@"Pages"
          style:UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered 
          target:self          
          action:@selector(handleBack:)];

    self.navigationItem.backBarButtonItem = backButton;
    [backButton release];

    [self.navigationController pushViewController:controller animated:animated];
    [controller release];

}   

- (void)handleBack:(id)sender
{
    // not reaching here
    NSLog(@"handleBack event reached");
}

Answer 1

You can make your own button and place it as the leftBarButtonItem. Then have it call your method where you can do whatever, and call [self.navigationController popViewController... yourself

Answer 2

You can implement the viewWillDisappear method of UIViewController. This gets called when your controller is about to go away (either because another one was pushed onto the navigation controller stack, or because the 'back' button was pressed).

To determine whether the view is disappearing because of the back button being pressed, you can use a custom flag that you set wherever you push a new controller onto the navigation controller, like shown below

- (void)viewWillDisappear:(BOOL)animated {
    [super viewWillDisappear:animated];
    if (viewPushed) {
        viewPushed = NO;   // Flag indicates that view disappeared because we pushed another controller onto the navigation controller, we acknowledge it here
    } else {
        // Here, you know that back button was pressed
    }   
}

And wherever you push a new view controller, you would have to remember to also set that flag...

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    ...
    viewPushed = YES;
    [self.navigationController pushViewController:myNewController animated:YES];
    ...
}