accessing previous allocated viewController and its methods

[Smokin Joe]

In my app, a specific ViewController overlays itself (as navigational buttons) over a galleryViewController that can be switched around.

However, my issue is that after I allocate a new galleryViewController, then switch to that view, I want to be able to send back information regarding what is being displayed to the original ViewController.

So within this galleryViewController I alloc a viewController object and attempt to do what needs to be done.

However, I've come to understand that this viewController object is a NEW allocated object. So the various UIButtons I want to make hidden and unhide are NOT the ones currently present in the superview - they haven't even been allocated.

How can I access the original viewController - it's the one that is declared and addedToTheSubview in the appDelegate.

I am not really sure how much I was able to properly relate, if there are any specific code questions please ask and I can post it. I don't have any errors in my code, just more of a question of syntax.

Thanks in advance!

[Smokin Joe]

In case it helps:

Essentially I have a parentViewController that allocates and brings into the superview a childViewController. On this childViewController I have a performTransition method that needs to trigger a method within the parentViewController.

I've tried to do:

[parentViewController doTheThing:index]

However the parentViewController needs to be allocated, and when I allocate it, the object is different than the actual Parent parentViewController - so everything I'd want to manipulate hasn't been initialized yet (or even added to the view for that matter).

How can I access the already existing parentViewController?

[Smokin Joe]

So I've learned I need to access it through the appDelegate so I have these lines of code in my childViewController:

AppDelegate *appDelegate = (AppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication]delegate];
ParentViewController *pvc = appDelegate.viewController;
[pvc doTheThing:index];
[pvc release];

However, some odd behavior takes place. If I remove the [pvc release], I can go through all my gallery slides, my UIButtons are manipulated exactly as I would want... but I just feel that [pvc release] is supposed to be there.

But with it I can only go through the above code twice before it crashes with an EXC_BAD_ACCESS. I think it probably has something to do with my rudimentary knowledge of the iOS syntax, but anyone willing to explain to me would be greatly thanked!

So to anyone following along, all I had to do was remove [pvc release]; from my above code and everything works superfantastic.. Even though, I feel that may lead to a memory issue.

But hey, I've been wrong before.