ViewDidLoad / Unload messages to super?

Question

I have noticed code from other sources where the author has not added the messages to super that are shown below. I usually add them both, but I was just curious as to what

Answer 1

You should only override a method when you need to perform some kind of action, so I'm assuming your code really looks something like this:

-(void)viewDidLoad {
    //do things that need to be done when the view is loaded
    [super viewDidLoad];
}

If you think the parent if your view needs to do something as well, then a call to [super viewDidLoad]; is definitely in order. If you look at the documentation for viewDidLoad, however, it states

This method is most commonly used to perform additional initialization steps on views that are loaded from nib files

The word "additional" here is crucial: it's just a convenience method. This is in contrast to dealloc, where the documentation states explicitly that when overriding dealloc you must always finish with a call to [super dealloc].

If your implementation of viewDidLoad and viewDidUnload really don't do anything else but call super, you should remove them: they accomplish nothing apart from making extra work for the compiler.