使用自定义segue在导航堆栈上向后移动

Question

I'm moving my App to Storyboards and, so far, so good.

However, I've found something that I don't really understand and worries me. I would appreciate if someone can provide some insight on this.

My app uses a normal Navigation Controller. For moving "forward" to new View Controllers, I'm using custom segues; no problems there. However, there's a point in the App where I want to move back to the beginning of the Navigation Stack. I have also configured that "navigation" using a custom segue, for that, I created the segue in Interface Builder by dragging the last view controller to the first one (that already looks weird to me), and I've implemented the custom segue perform method in the following way:

-(void)perform
{
    UIViewController *src = (UIViewController *)self.sourceViewController;
    UIViewController *dest = (UIViewController *)self.destinationViewController;

    [src.navigationController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:NO];
    // Custom animation code here
}

... It works great. However, I don't understand why it works. In my mind, the custom segue should be instantiating a new instance of my first view controller and assign it as "dest", but it looks like the segue is smart enough to realize I want to navigate to a previous, existent, instance of a View Controller and, instead of creating a new instance, it assigns to "dest" the existing one.

Does anybody know if using segues in this way is ok? Is it possible that it works by chance but might stop working in the future? Am I wasting memory in anyway as the segue is instantiating a View Controller I'm not going to use?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

• Am I wasting memory in anyway as the segue is instantiating a View Controller I'm not going to use?

Yes sir! By using a segue, you effectively allocate a new view controller as it's needed to set the DestinationController property for your custom segue. Test by yourself : add a static counter into your root controller, increment it each time this class is initialized and display it in your view : you'll see it getting incremented every time you pop to root using this trick.

• Does anybody know if using segues in this way is ok?

As long as you're effectively wasting memory, no!

There's at least one solution to this problem : release the DestinationController of the segue in your (void)perform implentation. This is really quick to implement, but kinda ugly since you allocate and immediately release your view controller every time... even if it's better than just leaking it, it's not what I'd call a good practice! To my mind, a better way to achieve what you want would be to not use a segue for that transition, just to use a button or whatever and call popToRootViewController:animated when getting a touch on this button.

• Is it possible that it works by chance but might stop working in the future?

For both the first solution I suggested and the way you're currently doing it, I see absolutely no reason : these are not complicated tweaks, just 'bad-implemented' standard navigation. The second solution is perfectly normal so no worries.