Refresh UIView from Subview - cocoa-touch

Question

in my universal app, I have a UIControl View inside of a UIScrollView.
On pressing a setup Button, I add another View as subview, like this:
SetupController *setupview = [[SetupController alloc] initWithNibName:#"SetupView-iPad" bundle:nil];
[mainview addSubview:setupview.view];
The subview is displayed like expected.
In this SubView I have some Buttons, which allows the user to switch between settings.
The performed actions are saved in a local Database.
The problem is: On ButtonClick in the SubView, I have to refresh the mainview, to apply the changes. I've tested many ways to make this happen:
In the Subviews class:
[self.parentViewController.view setNeedsDisplay];
No result.
Then I tried to refresh the mainview by notification:
I added this to my subviews classfile, in the function that changes my settings.
if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad) {
NSNotificationCenter *nc = [NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter];
[nc postNotificationName:#"setEmoticon_NOTIFICATION" object:self];
}
Then I added the observer to my mainview in the ViewDidLoad method:
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:#selector(refreshView) name:#"setEmoticon_NOTIFICATION" object:nil];
and created the function for this observer:
-(void)refreshView{
NSLog(#"Notification!");
[self.view performSelectorOnMainThread:#selector(setNeedsDisplay) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:YES];
}
In Log I get the "Notification!" on changing the settings. But whatever I try, no refresh.
I tried setNeedsDisplay, resignFirstResponder, [self viewDidLoad:] , but still nothing works.
Any ideas how to refresh my mainview?

Answer 1

What exactly do you need to do when refreshing? Do you need to redraw elements on screen, etc?
Do you have a custom refresh method you've implemented in the main view? I would setup a custom protocol in your sub view and before adding the sub view to the main view, I would add the sub view's delegate as the main view
SetupController *setupview = [[SetupController alloc] initWithNibName:#"SetupView-iPad" bundle:nil];
setupView.delegate = mainview;
[mainview addSubview:setupview.view];
Then handle the refresh in the main view call back.

Answer 2

Hell yeah, seems like I found a solution to refresh my superview from subview.
You only have to add the following code snippet to the desired action/method, that should perform the refresh, in your subview controller.
for (UIView* next = [self.view superview]; next; next = next.superview)
{
UIResponder* nextResponder = [next nextResponder];
if ([nextResponder isKindOfClass:[UIViewController class]])
{
[(UIViewController*)nextResponder viewWillAppear:YES];
}
}
In this case I reload the superview, using it's viewWillAppear method.
You can replace it with any method that fits your needs (viewDidLoad, viewWillDissapear etc.).
It may not be the best way to do this, but it works great for me.
Thanks for your answers. ;)