Storyboard and custom init

objective-c, storyboard, uiviewcontroller

Solution

I would just create a method which does the custom data loading.

UIStoryboard *storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:@"MainStoryboard" bundle:nil];
MyViewController *myViewController = [storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:@"MyViewControllerIdentifier"];
[myViewController loadCustomData:myCustomData];
[self presentViewController:myViewController animated:YES completion:nil];

If all your `initWithCustomData` method does is set one instance variable, you should just set it manually (no custom inits or extra methods required):

UIStoryboard *storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:@"MainStoryboard" bundle:nil];
MyViewController *myViewController = [storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:@"MyViewControllerIdentifier"];
myViewController.iVarData = myCustomData;
[self presentViewController:myViewController animated:YES completion:nil];

Problem

I recently tried working with the MainStoryboard.storyboard within Xcode and so far It's going pretty good and I'm wondering why I've never used it before. While playing with some code I bumped into an obstacle and I don't know how to resolve this. When I alloc and init a new ViewController (with a custom init I declared in the ViewControllers class) I would do something like this: ``` ViewController *myViewController = [[ViewController alloc] initWithMyCustomData:myCustomData]; ``` Then after that I could do something like: ``` [self presentViewController:myViewController animated:YES completion:nil]; ``` When I'm working with a storyboard I'm learnt that switching to a standalone ViewController requires an Identifier. ``` UIStoryboard *storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:@"MainStoryboard" bundle:nil]; ViewController *myViewController = [storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:@"MyViewControllerIdentifier"]; [self presentViewController:myViewController animated:YES completion:nil]; ``` How can I still use my custom initialization for myViewController while making use of a storyboard? Is it ok to just do something like this: ``` UIStoryboard *storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:@"MainStoryboard" bundle:nil]; ViewController *myViewController = [storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:@"MyViewControllerIdentifier"]; myViewController.customData = myCustomData; [self presentViewController:myViewController animated:YES completion:nil]; //MyViewController.m - (id) initWithMyCustomData:(NSString *) data { if (self = [super init]) { iVarData = data; } return self; } ```

Original source