Programmatically change subviews from within subview's controller

Question

In my iPhone applcation I've set up a default, blank view called Main View into which various child subviews will be loaded for different parts of the application. It's the same approach as if I was using a tool bar to switch between subviews. That case, in the MainView controller I could hook IBActions to buttons in the toolbar, so that when a button was pressed, MainView added different subviews to itself.

In my situation, though, I need to tell MainView to change its subview from within the subviews. So here are two sister subviews, each with their own controller and xib, that would be loaded as subviews of MainView: - StartView - FormView

In StartView, after some animations and welcome stuff, a button triggers the camera image picker. Once the image picker returns the image, I need to tell MainView to remove StartView and add FormView.

It may be the result of a long day or my newness to iPhone OS but I'm stuck getting my head around the right way to set up my objects/controllers.

Answer 1

You never have more than one view controller active at a time. (The nav and tabbar controllers don't control views, they control other controllers.) In this case, you will have a single controller that has the MainView as its view property. It will add StartView and formView as subviews of MainView.

However, this is not a good design. It will overload the MainView controller by forcing it to juggle many views. It would be better to use a hidden navigation controller or a tabbar. Hierarchies of controllers can create the illusion from the users point of view for almost any interface layout you can imagine. There is no need to create a logical structure that mimics the visual one.

From your description you may only need a single view/view-controller pair: Set the formView controller to open the camera view before it displays the formView. When the camera is dismissed it reverts to the formView automatically. No fuss, no muss.