Passing Data between View Controllers

Question

I'm new to iOS and Objective-C and the whole MVC paradigm and I'm stuck with the following:

I have a view that acts as a data entry form and I want to give the user the option to select multiple products. The products are listed on another view with a UITableViewController and I have enabled multiple selections.

My question is, how do I transfer the data from one view to another? I will be holding the selections on the UITableView in an array, but how do I then pass that back to the previous data entry form view so it can be saved along with the other data to Core Data on submission of the form?

I have surfed around and seen some people declare an array in the app delegate. I read something about Singletons but don't understand what these are and I read something about creating a data model.

What would be the correct way of performing this and how would I go about it?

Answer 1

I am currently contributing to an open source solution to this problem through a project called MCViewFactory, which may be found here:

https://github.com/YetiHQ/manticore-iosviewfactory

The idea is imitate Android's intent paradigm, using a global factory to manage which view you are looking at and using "intents" to switch and pass data between views. All the documentation is on the github page, but here are some highlights:

You setup all your views in .XIB files and register them in the app delegate, while initializing the factory.

// Register activities

MCViewFactory *factory = [MCViewFactory sharedFactory];

// the following two lines are optional. 
[factory registerView:@"YourSectionViewController"]; 

Now, in your VC, anytime you want to move to a new VC and pass data, you create a new intent and add data to its dictionary (savedInstanceState). Then, just set the current intent of factory:

MCIntent* intent = [MCIntent intentWithSectionName:@"YourSectionViewController"];
[intent setAnimationStyle:UIViewAnimationOptionTransitionFlipFromLeft];
[[intent savedInstanceState] setObject:@"someValue" forKey:@"yourKey"];
[[intent savedInstanceState] setObject:@"anotherValue" forKey:@"anotherKey"];
// ...
[[MCViewModel sharedModel] setCurrentSection:intent];

All of your views that conform to this need to be subclasses of MCViewController, which allow you to override the new onResume: method, allowing you access to the data you've passed in.

-(void)onResume:(MCIntent *)intent {
    NSObject* someValue = [intent.savedInstanceState objectForKey:@"yourKey"];
    NSObject* anotherValue = [intent.savedInstanceState objectForKey:@"anotherKey"];

    // ...

    // ensure the following line is called, especially for MCSectionViewController
    [super onResume:intent];
}

Hope some of you find this solution useful/interesting.

Answer 2

if you wants to pass data from ViewControlerOne to ViewControllerTwo try these..

do these in ViewControlerOne.h

 @property (nonatomic, strong) NSString *str1;

do these in ViewControllerTwo.h

 @property (nonatomic, strong) NSString *str2;

Synthesize str2 in ViewControllerTwo.m

@interface ViewControllerTwo ()
@end
@implementation ViewControllerTwo
@synthesize str2;

do these in ViewControlerOne.m

 - (void)viewDidLoad
 {
   [super viewDidLoad];

  // Data or string you wants to pass in ViewControllerTwo..
  self.str1 = @"hello world";

 }

on the buttons click event do this..

-(IBAction)ButtonClicked
{ //Navigation on buttons click event from ViewControlerOne to ViewControlerTwo with transferring data or string..
  ViewControllerTwo *objViewTwo=[self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:@"ViewControllerTwo"];
  obj.str2=str1;
  [self.navigationController pushViewController: objViewTwo animated:YES];
}

do these in ViewControllerTwo.m

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
 [super viewDidLoad];
  NSLog(@"%@",str2);
}

Answer 3

I like the idea of Model objects and Mock objects based on NSProxy to commit or discard data if what user selects can be cancelled.

It's easy to pass data around since it's single object or couple of objects and if you have let's say UINavigationController controller, you can keep the reference to model inside and all pushed view controllers can access it directly from navigation controller.

Answer 4

The M in MVC is for "Model" and in the MVC paradigm the role of model classes is to manage a program's data. A model is the opposite of a view -- a view knows how to display data, but it knows nothing about what to do with data, whereas a model knows everything about how to work with data, but nothing about how to display it. Models can be complicated, but they don't have to be -- the model for your app might be as simple as an array of strings or dictionaries.

The role of a controller is to mediate between view and model. Therefore, they need a reference to one or more view objects and one or more model objects. Let's say that your model is an array of dictionaries, with each dictionary representing one row in your table. The root view for your app displays that table, and it might be responsible for loading the array from a file. When the user decides to add a new row to the table, they tap some button and your controller creates a new (mutable) dictionary and adds it to the array. In order to fill in the row, the controller creates a detail view controller and gives it the new dictionary. The detail view controller fills in the dictionary and returns. The dictionary is already part of the model, so nothing else needs to happen.

Answer 5

In my case I used a singleton class which can work as a global object allowing accesses to the data from almost everywhere in the app. First thing is to build a singleton class. Please refer to the page," What should my Objective-C singleton look like? " And what I did to make the object globally accessible was simply import it in appName_Prefix.pch which is for applying import statement in every classes. To access this object and to use, I simply implemented class method to return the shared instance, which contains its own variables

Answer 6

There are many answers to this questions offering many different ways to perform view controller communication that would indeed work, but I don't see anywhere mentioned which one are actually best to use and which ones to avoid.

In practice, in my opinion only a few solutions are recommended:

• To pass data forward:
  • override the prepare(for:sender:) method of UIViewController when using a storyboard and segues
  • pass data through an initializer or through properties when performing view controller transitions thtough code
• To pass data backwards
  • update the app shared state (which you can pass forward between view controllers with either one of the methods above)
  • use delegation
  • use an unwind segue

Solutions I recommend NOT to use:

• Referencing the previous controller directly instead of using delegation
• Sharing data through a singleton
• Passing data through the app delegate
• Sharing data through the user defaults
• Passing data through notifications

These solutions, although working in the short term, introduce too many dependencies that will garble the architecture of the app and create more problems later.

For those interested, I wrote some articles that address these points more in depth and highlight the various drawbacks:

• How iOS View Controllers Communicate With Each Other
• How to Structure the Code of iOS Apps
• Understanding the Core Architectural Principles of iOS Development with a Practical Example