Which should I use, -awakeFromNib or -viewDidLoad?

Question

I recently had a problem in my app where some of the subviews I was creating in a UIViewController subclass's -awakeFromNib method were disappearing from the view. After some poking around I found that moving the code I had put in -awakeFromNib to -viewDidLoad solved the problem. Seems that -awakeFromNib gets called only once when the UIViewController is unarchived from the nib, and -viewDidLoad gets called every time the view is unarchived.

So what's the best practice? It looks like UIViewController's -awakeFromNib shouldn't be adding any views to the view, that kind of stuff should be done in -viewDidLoad. Am I understanding this correctly? Or am I more confused than I thought?

Answer 1

awakeFromNib is called when the controller itself is unarchived from a nib. viewDidLoad is called when the view is created/unarchived. This distinction is especially important when the controller's view is stored in a separate nib file.

Answer 2

Also important is that the awakeFromNib function will never be called after recovering from memory warning. But, the viewDidLoad function will be called.