Question

Imagine I have a view controller called blueView and another called greenView. I then add greenView.view as a subview of blueView.view. Now suppose that after some user interaction, I’d like to remove greenView.view from blueView.view using:

[self.view removeFromSuperview]

What is actually happening here? Is blueView.view ever redrawn? I thought the viewDidLoad method might be called, however after putting an NSLog messge in viewDidLoad, it was never called after removing the subview. Any clarification as to what is actually happening when you remove a subview from its superview would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

First, a view controller is meant to manage an entire view hierarchy at once; you shouldn’t have two view controllers (other than container controllers like UINavigationController) active at the same time. See this SO question and my answer to get a better understanding on this important point. So, the particular situation you describe shouldn’t come up. (Aside: people often confuse views and view controllers, so it’s not helpful to give your view controllers names ending in “-view”, like “blueView.” Call it “blueViewController” to help avoid confusion.)

Second, as @InsertWittyName points out, -viewDidLoad is a UIViewController method, not a UIView method. Taking that a step further, neither view controllers nor -viewDidLoad has any role in adding or removing subviews from a view. -viewDidLoad is called when the view controller’s view is first created. It’s basically just a way of deferring the view-related part of view controller initialization until after the view hierarchy has been created, so there’s no reason that it’d be called again just because a subview was removed from the hierarchy.

Finally, exactly how a view removes itself from its superview is really an implementation detail — it might call a private UIView method on the superview, or it might modify the superview’s list of subviews directly, or something else. I don’t see anything in the documentation that explicitly says that the superview will redraw itself after a subview has been removed, but in my experience the superview does indeed redraw itself. You can check this by putting a breakpoint on the -drawRect method of the superview.