Question

The title pretty much says it.

I have a UITableViewController. I have some arrays I want to initialize. These have nothing to do with any views. Just pure backend data. Where should I put them?

I do not want to put them in viewDidLoad as everytime there is a memory issue, the view will be unloaded. And there is no need to do those initialization everytime a view is loaded.

Obviously not viewWillAppear.

The other places I tried was initWithCoder and awakeFromNib.

However what I observed was if I have a tabBarController with each tab having a UItableviewController, on first loading of the app, even though the selected tab is the first one, the awakeFromNib and initWithCoder is called for all other tabs.

I did not want that, because those initializations could possibly be delayed till the tab is actually selected for the first time.

Please advise.

Answer 1

For the combination of behaviors you are looking for I think the solution is to perform your initialization in -viewDidLoad thus deferring it as late as possible but do so conditionally so that you do not re-initialize your arrays when the controller reloads its view.