Question

I am converting an iPhone app to a Universal app. I have a NIB view which I want to use on the iPad as is but resized and positioned. On the iPhone I am initializing normally with initWithNibName…

 EventEditViewController *eventEditViewController = [[EventEditViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"EventEditViewController" bundle:nil];

I found that this did not work well for me on the iPad for various reasons. So I created my own initialization method to call instead when running on the iPad…

EventEditViewController *eventEditViewControllerForIPad = [[EventEditViewController alloc] initWithFrame:iPadFrame eventDate:longDate event:eventName delegate:self];

This solved a couple of problems. One how to resize and position the view where I wanted it and how to properly initialize certain variables. I am actually passing more variables than you see here.

It works really well, but I just now noticed that, unlike initWithNibName viewDidLoad fires before my initWithFrame method. I only found this out because a variable I was trying to access in viewDidLoad was showing up as a zombie and I thought I was initializing it in my initWithFrame method.

I was surprised by this behavior. Is it normal? It doesn’t make sense to me that the view would be loaded before the named initMethod in the alloc/init call.

I am now wondering if what I am doing might not be a good thing. Like I said it works really well, but should I not use my own initialization method here?

If it’s ok to do it this way, maybe someone can explain why the view loads before the init method.

Thanks,

John

Answer 1

If your -initWithFrame:... method is accessing the view controller’s view property, -viewDidLoad will be called before the init method completes because the view accessor will cause the view to be loaded.

As for whether it’s okay to use your own method, it should be fine provided that your init method calls the designated initializer for the class.