UIViewController viewDidLoad vs. viewWillAppear: What is the proper division of labor?

I have always been a bit unclear on the type of tasks that should be assigned to viewDidLoad vs. viewWillAppear: in a UIViewController subclass.

e.g. I am doing an app where I have a UIViewController subclass hitting a server, getting data, feeding it to a view and then displaying that view. What are the pros and cons of doing this in viewDidLoad vs. viewWillAppear?

viewDidLoad is things you have to do once. viewWillAppear gets called every time the view appears. You should do things that you only have to do once in viewDidLoad - like setting your UILabel texts. However, you may want to modify a specific part of the view every time the user gets to view it, e.g. the iPod application scrolls the lyrics back to the top every time you go to the "Now Playing" view.

However, when you are loading things from a server, you also have to think about latency. If you pack all of your network communication into viewDidLoad or viewWillAppear, they will be executed before the user gets to see the view - possibly resulting a short freeze of your app. It may be good idea to first show the user an unpopulated view with an activity indicator of some sort. When you are done with your networking, which may take a second or two (or may even fail - who knows?), you can populate the view with your data. Good examples on how this could be done can be seen in various twitter clients. For example, when you view the author detail page in Twitterrific, the view only says "Loading..." until the network queries have completed.

It's important to note that using viewDidLoad for positioning is a bit risky and should be avoided since the bounds are not set. this may cause unexpected results (I had a variety of issues...)

This post describes quite well the different methods and what happens in each of them.

currently for one-time init and positioning I'm thinking of using viewDidAppear with a flag, if anyone has any other recommendation please let me know.

Initially used only ViewDidLoad with tableView. On testing with loss of Wifi, by setting device to airplane mode, realized that the table did not refresh with return of Wifi. In fact, there appears to be no way to refresh tableView on the device even by hitting the home button with background mode set to YES in -Info.plist.

My solution:

-(void) viewWillAppear: (BOOL) animated { [self.tableView reloadData];}

Depends, Do you need the data to be loaded each time you open the view? or only once?

• Red : They don't require to change every time. Once they are loaded they stay as how they were.
• Purple: They need to change over time or after you load each time. You don't want to see the same 3 suggested users to follow, it needs to be reloaded every time you come back to the screen. Their photos may get updated... you don't want to see a photo from 5 years ago...

viewDidLoad: Whatever processing you have that needs to be done once.
viewWilLAppear: Whatever processing that needs to change every time the page is loaded.

Labels, icons, button titles or most dataInputedByDeveloper usually don't change. Names, photos, links, button status, lists (input Arrays for your tableViews or collectionView) or most dataInputedByUser usually do change.