Question

I have pre allocated the mail and messaging controllers on startup in my app delegate to save the initialisation time (over 10 secs) when the user is using my application…

__mailController = [[MFMailComposeViewController alloc] init];
__messageController = [[MFMessageComposeViewController alloc] init];

It works fine the first time the controller is displayed then the next time the message is not changed and the old message is still displayed ?? … Is it likely that the controller is being deallocated ??? Strange as the views work correctly just that the message is not correct ?

- (IBAction)actionSMS:(id)sender {

if([MFMessageComposeViewController canSendText])
{
    self.messageController.body = self.MessageDetail.text;
//      controller.recipients = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"[phone]", nil];
    [self presentModalViewController:self.messageController animated:YES];
}
}

Answer 1

Once MFMailComposeViewController and MFMessageComposeViewController are presented to the user you can’t make changes to the content they display.

MFMailComposeViewController Class Reference:

Important The mail composition interface itself is not customizable
and must not be modified by your application. In addition, after
presenting the interface, your application is not allowed to make
further changes to the email content. The user may still edit the
content using the interface, but programmatic changes are ignored.
Thus, you must set the values of content fields before presenting the
interface.

That means those values are somehow locked in the implementation of the MFM*ViewController at the moment you present the controller. So you can’t reuse these viewControllers. iOS doesn’t care if the controller is, like in your case, invisible or not. If it is presented the content is locked.

I would figure out why it takes 10 seconds to allocate them. And then dump that whole pre-allocation thingie. 10 seconds are definitely to much.