Add a child view controller's view to a subview of the parent view controller

Question

I want to add a tableViewController as a child view controller of a containerViewController (shown below). According to Apple's View Controller Programming Guide I can achieve this by the following lines of code inside my containerViewController:

   [self addChildViewController:tableViewController];
   [self.view addSubview:tableViewController.view];
   [tableViewController didMoveToParentViewController:self];

In fact, that works fine. Now the problem is that I do not want to add the tableViewController's view as a subview of the containerViewController's root view. Instead I want to add it as a subview of the containerView (see image) which itself is a subview of the containerViewController's root view. So I changed the above code as follows:

   [self addChildViewController:tableViewController];
   [self.contentView addSubview:tableViewController.view];
   [tableViewController didMoveToParentViewController:self];

Now when I launch the app it crashes immediately with this error:

Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'UIViewControllerHierarchyInconsistency', reason: 'child view controller: should have parent view controller: but actual parent is:'

What is the problem here? Is it not possible to add a childViewController's view to a specific sub view of its containerViewController? Or how can I achieve this without an error in the view controller hierarchy?

Answer 1

It doesn't really matter which view you are adding the child viewController to. If a view of a viewController is added to another viewController you need set it properly.

tableViewController.view.frame = self.contentView.bounds;
[self.contentView addSubview:tableViewController.view];
/*Calling the addChildViewController: method also calls 
the child’s willMoveToParentViewController: method automatically */
[self addChildViewController:tableViewController];
[tableViewController didMoveToParentViewController:self];

Source code