Reuse childs from custom UIVIewController using storyboard

Question

I have a storyboard with a navigation controller that leads to an UIVIewController that I want to reuse. That UIVIewController has a ParentUIViewController that has all the basic functionalities for all the UIVIewControllers that I am reusing.

Currently I am copying and pasting (meh) and then I change the class of the UIViewController to the ChildUIVIewController that I want to use (ChildUIViewController extends ParentUIViewController).

But this sounds like a bad solution. Everytime I want to change the ParentViewController visually I need to update, manually, all other ChildViewControllers.

I have tried to create a xib for the ParentViewController but the xib isn't loaded because I need a xib with the name of the ChildViewController . I have created it and then said the class is the ParentViewController but it crashes in the segue.

EDIT

I have created an example of the status of my problem

https://github.com/tiagoalmeida/storyboardexample

Note that the ParentViewController has a set of logic way more complicated that is not illustrated there. Also note that I am also using a TableView. I hope that this can illustrate the problem.

Answer 1

Keep the logic on the parentViewController and the UI Part on the child UIViewControllers . If you need to create a new UIViewController , you will create a child that will have a corresponding XIB (or get rid of XIBs and create the interface by hand).

Answer 2

Have you considered looping back into the same UIViewController via a "phantom button"?

Have a look at this: UIStoryboard Power Drill, Batteries included

Essentially you can drag a Bar Button Item into the little black bar under the View Controller in Storyboard (the 1 with View Controller, First Responder, and Exit icons; sorry, I don't recall what this is called exactly), then you can control+drag from that button back into the UIViewController for a Push segue. This should create a loop segue in your Storyboard. All you need to do next is give that segue an identifier, programmatically call it from your code using [self performSegueWithIdentifier:] , then implement -(void)prepareForSegue: and use [segue destinationViewController] to conditionally set the title and perhaps some flags so you can identify when to use different kinds of fetches (or other code variations) in the same Class code.