Question

What happens when [super loadView] or [super viewDidLoad] is written? I tried to remove the code but the stack overflows and goes into infinite loop. Can someone please explain why is this required?

Answer 1

First of all, when you override loadView, to create your own views manually, you should NOT call the superclass’s implementation. This is because you would be creating a view manually, and using those instead of the view that would be created by UIViewController‘s implementation. (See the loadview documentation.)

But when you override viewDidLoad, you should indeed call the superclass’s implementation. This is because UIViewController‘s implementation of viewDidLoad does some internal bookkeeping, and so you want to run your custom viewDidLoad code in addition to what the superclass does.