Question

I have a tab bar controller view that loads a record from an api call. Since different data is shown for the same record on each tab I’m storing the object in the app delegate and just grabbing it on viewDidLoad.

The problem I’m running into is that this record is related to other records, and one of the tabs has the other records listed. So if you click on one of those it needs to essentially reload the same tab bar controller.

I’m going to reload the same controller using the instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifer method, but how would the back button work on this since if it went back that object is now gone.

My thoughts on reloading old objects was to keep an array of all the ids of the records loaded, and just go back to the last id and reload the object from the api.

Answer 1

For what you are trying to do, I would suggest creating your own custom implementation of a tab bar controller. By doing this you will be able store the data from each record as a property in your custom tabbar controller. You can then have multiple instances of your tab bar controller, each with its own data (and you won’t have to store anything in your app delegate, which ideally shouldn’t be used for this purpose anyway.)

Here is an example tutorial in which the author creates a custom tab bar controller similar to what you would need:

http://www.iphonedevcentral.com/create-uitabbarcontroller/