Embedded UIScrollView not loading its subviews - ios

Question

I have perhaps a strange VC structure here that I just made a bit stranger, causing it to break
UIViewController (contains->) UIContainerView (embeds ->) UIScrollView (contains ->) UIView
I have the final UIView because I couldn't figure out how to make the scrollview adhere to certain size restrictions so I just added a "content view".
Problem is, now the "content view's" data isn't loading
The Logs for the contentview are:
<UIView: 0x81cd510; frame = (-306 0; 612 792); autoresize = TM+BM; layer = <CALayer: 0x81c2000>>
The Logs for the Scrollview are
<UIScrollView: 0x81e5e90; frame = (0 0; 0 0); clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; autoresize = W+H; gestureRecognizers = <NSArray: 0x81e67b0>; layer = <CALayer: 0x81e6060>; contentOffset: {0, 0}>
so it appears to not be loading... what gives? How to I make it load?
Edit to clarify:
All of these views were created though IB
Not using AutoLayouts (although that sounds interesting)
The NSLog methods are called in ViewDidAppear in the viewcontroller at the top of the view hierarchy chain. (Perhaps this is the issue?)
Edit: uploaded the project to github so that people can take a looksie
https://github.com/Pinwheeler/ChiroMatic.git

Answer 1

I spent quite a bit of time going through your project and, frustratingly, I was not able to deduce what was causing the problem. But I found I was able to fix the problem by recreating your PrintViewController and PrintContentViewController scenes (and I had to recreate both to fix the problem). I created a fork of your project and fixed the two scenes. I tried to annotate my changes in both the source code as well as the git repository commit comments, so hopefully you can follow what I changed. My fork is available at:
https://github.com/robertmryan/ChiroMatic
(Just let me know when you want me to remove that repo. I'm happy to remove it whenever you want, as I assume you don't want me to leave a copy on github indefinitely.)
A couple of observations:
You say that you're not using autolayout, but you are. (Go to the first Document Inspector tab on your storyboard and you'll see that "Use Autolayout" is checked.) That's fine if you want to use it (it's now the default in Xcode) but be forewarned that you lose backward compatibility to iOS versions prior to iOS 6 if you use it. Autolayout is powerful, but it can be tricky when you first start using it. It's your call.
In your PrintContentViewController, my most significant change was to use the standard view controller scene configuration (where the top level view is a UIView), and I made the UIScrollView a subview of that. Having said that, I don't think you needed the UIView subview of the UIScrollView (and it's problematic as you lose some scroll view functionality if you have that intermediate UIView), so I removed that, and made all of the labels and the like subviews of the scroll view itself.
You're using container views all over the place, but it strikes me that you're adding a level of complexity that's unnecessary. (And, by the way, you wouldn't have had the problem raised in your original question if you didn't use these container views.)
Custom containers are very useful when you want to abstract the logic associated with the container view controller from its child view controller. But you're not doing that here. Worse, you're going through all sorts of gyrations to grab the IBOutlet references of a child controller and updating the properties in the container controller. I'd heartily encourage you to reconsider your use of these container views and just excise them from your project entirely.
If you have a compelling need for the container views, fine use them (I love them and use them all the time), but I don't see any need for it here, and you're making life much more complicated for yourself.
Also, by the way, the use of the embed segue is an iOS 6 feature only, which can be an issue if you need iOS 5 backward compatibility.
Bottom line, I never was able to reproduce your problem when creating a new project and mirroring your storyboard. Nor was I able to eliminate your problem by any edits to your old PrintViewController and PrintContainerViewController scenes. I was only able to fix it when I recreated these scenes, and when I did that, it just worked.
I left your old scenes there (prefacing the segues with "old" so the storyboard wouldn't get confused), so maybe you can spend time figuring out what's wrong, but I don't see it. Maybe there was some bug in the storyboard that is evading me. Maybe there's some setting I'm not seeing. All I know is that when I just recreated it, copying your controls to my two new scenes, it just worked.
Personally, I'd advise cutting the Gordian knot, and just eliminate the container views altogether. Your code will be cleaner, and these sorts of issues are less likely to rear their ugly heads.
This isn't a satisfying conclusion (to not know what caused the problem), but at least it appears to be fixed. Good luck.