Best way to orchestrate multiple views in iOS without UITabBar or UINavigationBar?

Question

I'm trying to create an iPhone app with a welcome screen that leads to two or three pretty disparate UIs; once you've drilled into one you're not going to have much use for the others, and each one is itself fairly complicated.

The designers are all web types and it looks like the "navigation" paradigm is the closest to what they want, but the breadcrumb-style navigation bar isn't.

1. If I set up a UINavigationController, can I then drive it with arbitrary buttons in the views?
2. And in general, is it possible to swap out the contents of a view programmatically?
3. And if so, what do I need to watch out for? (E.g., in Java if you change the contents of a JPanel you need to make sure it gets revalidated and repainted.)

Total iOS newbie here, coming from the Java world, super-explicit advice much appreciated. Using Monotouch, but happy to take Obj-C help and translate. :)

Answer 1

It's hard to tell you how to design your app with only that information, so I'll assume you want to do a drill-down thing like a UINavigation controller.

1- Yes, you can drive the UINavigationController from other ViewControllers, using methods like PushViewController() and PopViewController(). You can also hide the toolbar or some of the toolbar buttons if you want. You can find some great examples here.

2- Yes, you can change contents of a view. Views contains other views and you can add and remove them as you want.

3- The main thing to be careful about is to make sure that calls that update the view are done inside a InvokeOnMainThread(()=>{}) call. More info here.