UIWindow and UIView addSubview Question

Question

Does the addSubview method actually load the view into the application or not? The reason I am asking is because I have two two views in my application. The application delegate adds the two views as subviews and then brings one of the views up front. Now, I have a print statement in each of the viewDidLoad methods for each view. When I run the application, the application delegate loads the views as subViews and as each view is loaded, I actually see the console print out the statements that I placed in each of the viewDidLoad methods. Is this supposed to be doing this?

Answer 1

viewDidLoad is actually a method of UIViewController, not UIView. It gets called after the view gets loaded into memory (after your init method, but before the awakeFromNib). You'll notice that addSubview: takes a UIView as a parameter, so the view must have been loaded in order for the view to be added to another view. Otherwise you'd be trying to add an imaginary view.

In answer to your question, yes it is supposed to be doing this. viewDidLoad is called long before you addSubview. In fact, if you take out the addSubview: lines, you'll notice that it's still getting called (because you're creating the view's controller).

Answer 2

My understanding is that views are lazily loaded. If your viewcontroller has 10 view, they are not all loaded until you actually try to access them.