viewWillDisappear: Determine whether view controller is being popped or is showing a sub-view controller

user_106244 0
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I'm struggling to find a good solution to this problem. In a view controller's -viewWillDisappear: method, I need to find a way to determine whether it is because a view controller is being pushed onto the navigation controller's stack, or whether it is because the view controller is disappearing because it has been popped.

At the moment I'm setting flags such as isShowingChildViewController but it's getting fairly complicated. The only way I think I can detect it is in the -dealloc method.

uiviewcontroller uikit iphone cocoa-touch ios
13 Answers

If you just want to know whether your view is getting popped, I just discovered that self.navigationController is nil in viewDidDisappear, when it is removed from the stack of controllers. So that's a simple alternative test.

(This I discover after trying all sorts of other contortions. I'm surprised there's no navigation controller protocol to register a view controller to be notified on pops. You can't use UINavigationControllerDelegate because that actually does real display work.)

user_862280

Thanks @Bryan Henry, Still works in Swift 5

    override func viewWillDisappear(_ animated: Bool) {
        super.viewWillDisappear(animated)
        if let controllers = navigationController?.children{
            if controllers.count > 1, controllers[controllers.count - 2] == self{
                // View is disappearing because a new view controller was pushed onto the stack
                print("New view controller was pushed")
            }
            else if controllers.firstIndex(of: self) == nil{
                // View is disappearing because it was popped from the stack
                print("View controller was popped")
            }
        }

    }
user_103324810
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