Do I programmatically add SubViews in ViewDidAppear, ViewDidLoad, ViewWillAppear, the constructor?

Question

I'm trying to figure out from Apple's sketchy documentation which method is the best place to be initializing and adding my Views controls to the controller's view.

With winforms it's fairly straightforward, as they're always initialized inside InitializeDesigner, called in the constructor. I'm trying to match the reliability of this pattern if possible.

I'm working with UIViewControllers and UITableViewControllers inside a UINavigationController most of the time - if this effects it all.

Here's an example:

public MyController()
{
    // Here?
    AddViews();
}

public override ViewDidLoad()
{
    base.ViewDidLoad();

    // Or is should it be here?
    AddViews();
}

public override ViewWillAppear(bool )
{
    base.ViewWillAppear(animated);

    // Here?
    AddViews();
}

public override ViewDidAppear(bool animated)
{
    base.ViewDidLoad(animated);

    // Or maybe here?
    AddViews();
}

void AddViews()
{
    UILabel label = new UILabel();
    label.Text = "Test";
    label.Frame = new RectangleF(100,100,100,26);
    View.AddSubView(label);

    UIWebView webview = new UIWebView();
    webview .Frame = new RectangleF(100,100,100,26);
    View.AddSubView(webview);
}

I get mixed results with some UIControls when I add them to the view in different places. Visual lag sometimes, othertimes the webview is hidden somewhere.

Is there a general rule to keep to for adding them?

Answer 1

In general, this is what I do:

• ViewDidLoad - Whenever I'm adding controls to a view that should appear together with the view, right away, I put it in the ViewDidLoad method. Basically this method is called whenever the view was loaded into memory. So for example, if my view is a form with 3 labels, I would add the labels here; the view will never exist without those forms.

• ViewWillAppear: I use ViewWillAppear usually just to update the data on the form. So, for the example above, I would use this to actually load the data from my domain into the form. Creation of UIViews is fairly expensive, and you should avoid as much as possible doing that on the ViewWillAppear method, becuase when this gets called, it means that the iPhone is already ready to show the UIView to the user, and anything heavy you do here will impact performance in a very visible manner (like animations being delayed, etc).

• ViewDidAppear: Finally, I use the ViewDidAppear to start off new threads to things that would take a long time to execute, like for example doing a webservice call to get extra data for the form above.The good thing is that because the view already exists and is being displayed to the user, you can show a nice "Waiting" message to the user while you get the data.

There are other tricks you can use, though. Lets say you want a UILabel to "fly" into the form after the form is loaded. In that case, I would add the label to the form in the ViewDidLoad but with a Frame outside of the view area, and then in the ViewDidAppear I would do the animation to fly it back into view.

Hope it helps.