UIViewControllers and UIWebView - iphone

Question

I am a newbie at iPhone development and have a question, which may end up helping understand this concept in general.
Basically, I have UIViewController which loads up a view with a bunch of stuff. Now I want when a user clicks on a button, to load up a different view, which happens to be a webView. Now, I want the weview to load up a different url depending on which button was pressed in the original view.
how do i go about doing this? Basically in my head I thought i could load and swap the views when the button is pressed, like so:
In
- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView
didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
NSString *selectedLink = [valuesForSection objectAtIndex:row];
NSString *urlAddress = #"http://www.google.com";
//Create a URL object.
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlAddress];
//URL Requst Object
NSURLRequest *requestObj = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
//Load the request in the UIWebView.
[webView loadRequest:requestObj];
[self.view removeFromSuperview];
[self.view insertSubview:webView atIndex:0];
}
Is this the right way of doing it? Or how do i go about doing this?

Answer 1

That would be the way I'd go about it, yes. Create a single UIWebView and, depending on which cell gets selected, load a NSURLRequest into the view using loadRequest:. It has the advantages of not requiring you to build separate web views for each cell, and of being asynchronous.
However, I wouldn't necessarily remove self.view from its superview whenever a cell gets clicked; rather, I'd pop up either a modal view controller (presentModalViewController:animated:) with the web view as its view, or I'd push a new controller onto a navigation controller stack (pushViewController:animated:). It's a smoother transition and will look better to the user.
Edit (in response to comment): Yes, it's better to have another controller than to just swap views. Doing removeFromSuperview and addSubview: keeps both views within the same controller, but as a result will make your code more difficult to manage (one controller will deal with two views) and have a worse user experience (there's no transition, like is built-in with a navigation controller push).
In order to do the push properly, you should:
Build a navigation controller for your existing view controller
When you need to, create a new instance of UIViewController with its view set to the UIWebView you create and load with your HTML
Push the new view controller onto the navigation controller stack from your old view controller by calling:
[self.navigationController pushViewController:newViewController animated:YES];