iOS Delegates instead of passing data through a segue

Question

I'm trying to learn how delegates work and wrap my head around the concept. I'm finding I get some of the ideas. I understand you use it to pass data from one view controller to another, however wouldn't it work the same if I just sent data from a segue and every time the 1st view controller would appear, it would use that data?

So for example I have 2 view controllers.
1 is homeViewController and
2 is editViewController.
I have a variable titled "addressOfHome" which is a string in homeViewController(1).
In homeViewController under the method "viewDidAppear"
I also set the addressLabel = addressOfHome.
Then I just pass the data from editViewController(2) to homeViewController(1)
when the segue's destination vc is homeViewController ?

I'm terrible at explaining things so I apologize for that, but I gave it my best shot. Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

Delegates are mainly used to "trigger action" on an object from another one.

An object delegates a way to handle something to someone else, for example when you click on an UIAlertView button, if its delegate is set on a viewController, alertView:clickedButtonAtIndex will be executed on the VC, which can so react as it want

I'm terrible at explaining things

Haha, yes, you are !

Answer 2

A delegate isn't for that - a delegate is a way to over-ride the default behaviour of some feature(s) of a class, without creating your own sub-class. See this post : How does a delegate work in objective-C?

Are you trying to understand how delegates work (in which case, I don't think your example is one that requires a delegate) or are you trying to implement the functionality you describe, and think that a delegate is the way to do it? (I think you actually want a data source).