Creating individual View Controllers for each view iOS?

Question

This is a very simple simple question, and I believe the answer is “yes, it’s a best practice,” but I just wanted to ask the question.

When creating new views in your storyboard in Xcode, is it a good idea to create individual custom view controller files to handle each view specifically?

Meaning, if I create a new view called “login quiz,” should I create a “loginQuizViewController” that will handle all the code I write for that view?

Answer 1

Short answer:

Yes, each storyboard scene generally has a unique view controller class associated with it. A view controller has a root view, which in turn may have many subviews below that, and each subview might have further subviews. This collection of views is collectively known as the “view hierarchy”.

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Long answer:

Yes, each storyboard “scene” has a view controller associated with it. And generally this view controller class is a particular UIViewController subclass which is unique to that particular Interface Builder scene. But you don’t necessarily have to have a view controller subclass and might, for example, use one of the existing classes (e.g. this is not uncommon for navigation controller scenes or tab bar controller scenes).

But if you have any custom logic associated with a particular storyboard scene, then, yes, you would generally have a unique view controller subclass for that particular scene.

Two minor clarifications:

• You refer to the “quiz view”.

  That’s fine for colloquial purposes, but for the sake of clarity, when we’re talking about everything for this quiz, it’s really a complex hierarchy of views, not just a one.

  A single “quiz” scene will be associated with a unique view controller class, and the instance of that view controller class will have a single “root view” (identified with the view property), but that view will have a whole bunch of subviews (e.g. image views, buttons, labels, etc.), and some of those may have subviews of their own.

  So one storyboard scene has its own unique view controller class, but is associated with a whole hierarchy of views.

• We often think of a scene, and its associated view controller, as representing everything you might see at any given point in time, but it’s not always a one-to-one relationship. Sometimes what you see is composed of several storyboard scenes and their respective view controllers.

  For example, if you are using a navigation controller, the navigation controller takes care of the navigation bar at the top, and your view controller might take care of everything under the navigation bar. What is visible on screen is composed of these two view controllers.

  Or, in a more extreme example, we can define our own view controller containers. In the example below, when we present A, we can define the bottom half of the screen to be managed by a completely separate scene, B, which has its own view controller:

  

  In this case, both A and B have their own IB scenes and their own respective view controllers. Achieve this by adding a “container view” to the A scene (the light blue UIView in the above screen snapshot).

  But the main point is that what you see on screen may be captured by a single storyboard scene and view controller, or it might be composed of several.