Do modal segues create new objects?

Question

Im transitioning from one view controller to another UINavigationController by using a modal segue. Its important for me that this view controller (and its child view controllers) stay in memory so specific references are kept up. Although obviously exactly this not happening. When debugging the viewWillAppear function the rootViewController (viewControllers[0]) reference points to different memory addresses between calls (and contains nil values, my actual problem). Now there two possibilities which could cause this issue:

• The UiNavigationController became destroyed
• The rootViewController became destroyed

But to make it really confusing, none of them did happen; neither the UINavigationController nor the rootViewController became destroyed (viewDidUnload not called!).

Edit: Further investigation discovered that the UINavigationController is really recreated for every modal segue. I hope that by maintaining a property i can solve the problem.

Answer 1

I finally ended up by creating my own IBAction functions wich present the controller manually. This works just fine and is coded in less than 5 minutes. One just need to init the controller one time on ViewDidLoad from the storyboard.

Answer 2

Create a strong reference in the main view controller and point your new view controllers to that property. This will keep the view around as long as you need, although this is not recommended for n number of views because it defeats the purpose of a nav controller handling its own creation and removing of views.