The internal workings implicitly popping from Navigation Controller

Question

I'm just curious to how a Navigation Controller is working when you pop out from a child view to a parent view. The reason I'm asking is because I have this kind of set up:
App Delegate:
Creates Nav Controller and inits it with a Root View
Root View:
Just some table view that allows to drill down a row to "Second View" lets call it
When I push the second view into the Nav's stack, it'll automatically create a back button to pop. I am noticing when I hit back, it displays the Root View but the view event methods, i.e. viewWillAppear, are not called. Why is this?
Since this is the case, what is the best way for me to reload the table view's data when I do a pop?

Answer 1

Hey Ray,
Sorry for all the confusion previously. I didn't have my personal computer at work so I wasn't able to copy/paste the exact code snippets but I can assure you that my print logs are working correctly. I actually have figured out what my issue was and I'll present to you (and anyone else who have run into a similar problem) what my problem was and what I did to solve it.
First of all, let me address your previous questions. I am creating my Nav controller and the root view in the app delegate via the applicationDidFinishLaunching method. So something like this:
myViewController *vc = [[myViewController alloc] initWithNibName@"myViewController" bundle:nil];
myNavController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:myViewController];
This was not the issue. The issue stems from the design of my app.
The *root view controller* is actually a view that acts as a *container for two other view controllers*. One of them a *UITableViewController that controls a UITableView*, and the other is a *UIViewController that controls a MKMapView*.
The UITableView has the ability to drill down into another table view, which invokes some actions that updates the list from the first view. This all works fine as I'm seeing in my logs.
The problem was when I pop back to the root view I don't see the list updated; this pop back I'm referring to is the "Back" UIBarButtonItem that gets prefabbed for me when I push something to the Nav controller's stack. From my logs, the UITableViewController's inherited method, viewWillAppear is not being invoked, therefore, the [self.tableView reloadData]; that I placed in there is not being called.
For some reason, a light bulb went on in my head today to investigate the container's view controller! *What I found out was only the container view controller's view event methods was getting called*; so all the viewWillAppear, viewDidAppear, etc... that I did not previously implement wasn't getting called and not appearing in the logs.
So now, in the container's view controller's viewWillAppear, I call the UITableViewController's viewWillAppear, and my UITableView's list gets updated. So it's all working perfectly now.
Thanks!