Storyboard in Xcode

Question

I've been working with Xcode for a while, and what I'm doing works, but I can't image that it is the best way to do it. When I want to transition between scenes in Xcode, I create a segue between UIViewControllers in the main storyboard. This is a picture of a storyboard in one of my apps.

By looking at the picture, you can probably understand why I'm curious about whether or not what I'm doing is bad practice. What should I be doing to transition between scenes, or what do most people do to transition between scenes? Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

This is not easy to answer, but I will give you some context:

1. Storyboards can be a nice visual way to remove push/present code from the view controllers and make it clear what is happening (vs code).
2. Having UIViewControllers handle navigation is not considered best practices (at least in many larger projects/enterprises). This is why patterns like VIPER (among other reasons, and yes VIPER can be overkill).

In your case the relationship is not clear, many things also go back and forth. Now it might be possible you can lay them out better, and perhaps the containment or relationships can be tweaked.

Here's some advice I can give. Try to make view controllers as dumb as possible about opening other view controllers, both the what and how - they ideally should just indicate to some controller/mediator/manager they wish to "do" something. It makes maintenance and refactoring a lot easier, especially adding a new feature later that might change how navigation works, such as adding on boarding into the app.

Long story short, storyboards are not bad, however many enterprise and large projects do not use them both due to the difficulty in version control with multiple developers (using shallow storyboards with NIBs can mitigate this, you do lose some of the Segue), and because you can tend to grow overly complex view controllers. Its great for personal, smaller apps... as complexity grows, value proposition becomes thinner.