iphone - How to get the previous viewcontroller that pushed my current view

Question

The home page of my app has UIButtons, btnIncome and btnExpense. Pressing on this buttons pushes IncomeVC and ExpenseVC respectevely,which are two UIViewControllers with UITabBar added via xib. The tabBar have 4 items. Selecting on each tab item adds same four view controllers(which contains UITableViews) as the subview of IncomeVC and ExpenseVC,like for eg, DailyVC,WeeklyVC,MonthlyVC,YearlyVC.(ie,for Income ,there is daily,weekly etc and same for Expense) (I have done like that because the IncomeVC and ExpenseVC have a UIButton and a UIView which is common for all tabs).

So the problem is that, if click the btnIncome I have to populate those tableviews with the arrays related to Income and vice versa for Expense. How can I find from which viewController I selected the different tabs(I need to get it from the 4 Views I added as the subview of IncomeVC and ExpenseVC). Do I have to make 8 different views 4 each for Income and expense ? Thanx.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16608536/how-to-get-the-previous-viewcontroller-that-pushed-my-current-view

Answer 1

If the reason for needing access to the previous view controller is to know what data to get, I would suggest that you instead give the new view controller the data before you push it on the stack. Or at least enough data so that the view controller know how to get the right data, e.g. a enum or constant or something.

This could be done with a custom initializer, or a property. Take a look at this blog post for an example: "Passing Data Between View Controllers"

If you are using a storyboard, you can use prepareForSegue:sender to pass the right data. A good tutorial on that can be found here: Beginning Storyboards in iOS 5 Part 2