I have a situation where I use a tab bar set up but with nav bar controllers on a couple tabs. Those tabs have table views on them. Everything works great, I can pick a tab and get a different table in a nav bar structure. The other tabs are non-nav controllers. Fine.

I want to use the same table view controller and even the same detail screen since they are essentially the same format. I have two-dimensional arrays and a couple of vars tracking which tab and which table row so when I get to the detail it's all good.

Now to the problem. It all seems to work just fine until I return to a tab that has already been visited. At that point, I do indeed get a viewWillAppear for both the view controller of that specific tab and the table view controller. However, I get the table view one first! It doesn't know which tab was tapped on; the other one does but that's too late to dynamically change the table!

Any suggestions? Am I being too greedy about code duplication? I mean I could just make separate controllers for for each table view and then separate detail view controllers but I thought I had a good solution.