reusing the same UITableViewController - ios

Question

I have a tableviewcontroller that needs to drill down and show 3 layers of data. I have no problem drilling down but when I go back, the cells and table become empty. I'm currently using storyboard and I didn't have this problem when I was using nib. All I had to to was alloc and initWithNibName the same view and it would create another instance of the same TableView and I can go back and all the data would be there.
I've tried using segue but it's not working as I need the tableviewcontroller to segue back to itself if I'm drilling down. I've created my own method to push the view controller and pass data into the new instance of itself
- (void)drillDown{
UIStoryboard *storyboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:#"Main" bundle:[NSBundle mainBundle]];
ExerciseTableViewController *tableView = [storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:#"ExerciseTableView"];
tableView.title = _detailTitle;
tableView.delegate = self;
tableView.level = _level;
tableView.currentSMID = _currentSMID;
tableView.currentMID = _currentMID;
tableView.muscleNameArray = _muscleNameArray;
if (_level == 2) {
tableView.submuscleNameArray = _submuscleNameArray;
}
[self.navigationController pushViewController:tableView animated:YES];
}
This is what I have in my viewDidLoad
- (void)viewDidLoad {
[super viewDidLoad];
UIBarButtonItem *add = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithBarButtonSystemItem:UIBarButtonSystemItemAdd target:self action:#selector(addExercise:)];
self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = add;
NSLog(#"level: %i, currentSMID: %i, currentMID: %i", _level, _currentSMID, _currentMID);
if (self.managedObjectContext_ == nil) {
self.managedObjectContext_ = [(AppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate] managedObjectContext];
}
if (_level == 1) {
_submuscleNameArray = [self submuscleGroup:_currentMID valueForKeyPath:#"submuscleGroup"];
_submuscleIDArray = [self submuscleGroup:_currentMID valueForKeyPath:#"submuscleID"];
} else if (_level == 2) {
//loading and sorting exercise list
_exerciseList = [self loadExercise:_currentMID sub:_currentSMID];
_exerciseListSorted = [self sortKeysByName];
} else {
[self loadMuscleGroup];
}
}
The table view is only populated when I put some of this code in the viewDidAppear but I can't differentiate between drilling down and going back up with the viewDidAppear.
Isn't the navigationController suppose to save my current view and push a new view and when I pop the new view, I go back to my current view?
It seems like everytime I pop the view, the previous view needs to load all over again and this is causing my previous views to become blank.
Any suggestions?
Storyboard attached

Answer 1

So I figured out what was the issue. I have a variable called _level and I use it to track which level of drill down I'm in. When passing this variable to the next level, I've replaced the current level with the next level number therefore when I come back to the previous view. The current level is the same as the next level which screwed things up.
I've solved it by creating a new variable called nextLevel and passing that down instead.
Very basic error on my part.