Question

I have something like a modal view controller that I need to display above my other view controllers. I’m not using the regular modal controller feature (presentViewController: and friends), since I need better control over the process. Instead I am using the view controller containment feature (the addChildViewController: method group).

The containment feature makes the code fairly straightforward. When I need to present the “modal” view controller, I add it as a child to the view controller hierarchy and everything works as expected. One small catch is that the regular view controllers are wrapped in a navigation controller. Therefore I have to add the modal controller as a child of the navigation controller, otherwise it would be covered by the navigation bar and toolbar.

Now the problem is that calling addChildViewController: on a navigation controller also sets the new controller as the topViewController, as if the controller was pushed using the regular pushViewController: method. This means that while the modal controller is displayed, the regular controller underneath it does not receive the appearance and rotation callbacks.

This feels like a bug, or am I missing something?

Answer 1

I missed this sentence in the documentation for addChildViewController:

This method is only intended to be called by an implementation of a
custom container view controller.

So I guess it’s my fault and this scenario is simply not supported. Which sucks, because it’s very convenient to design whatever modal things as regular view controllers and connect them to the hierarchy like proper first-class citizens. I would probably have to rewrite the navigation controller on my own to have built-in support for this.