popToViewController in a CoreData app

I have a CoreData app with the MainView the UITableViewController which houses all of the items in the list. What i'm trying to accomplish is adding a custom back button and using the popToViewController:animated: to access the settings. When I try to use this method the app crashes. After doing extensive reading I realized that push and pop use an NSArray stack for view controllers. For example, the rootView is view 0, when you use pushToViewController:animated: it added in another view, 1 and so forth. That all made sense. What I learned was you can't pop to a view which is not loaded into the stack a开发者_如何学Pythonfter the root view. My objective here is to pop to the settings view. When I change the code around in the AppDelegate.m to make the SettingsViewController the rootViewController, the UITableViewController no longer functions, it fails telling me the entity "enityName" can't be initialized. Is there any way to still have the CoreData part of the app function correctly and still pop to the settings? I have thought of using a modal view but it ruins the style of the app.

This was quite hard for me to explain, if you didn't understand any part of it, let me know. Thanks for your help.

Update: I read in the UINavigationBar documentation that you can use - (void)setItems:(NSArray *)items animated:(BOOL)animated thus allowing you to manually set the array of pushing and popping view controllers. I just can't figure out how to do that. I've gone through apples drillDown sample code, but it didn't have the functionality I was looking for.

Perhaps you are misunderstanding Apple's navigation controller idiom. It is meant for drilling down a hierarchical structure of views and move back and forward easily and intuitively.

A view that is outside this hierarchy (it seems your Settings View belongs to this category) should really be presented modally. On the iPad, you can even use the pretty and convenient UIPopOverControllers.

Of course, if you want to keep your own look and feel (incurring the danger of confusing your users), you could fiddle with the transition animation. You could use Apple's own and thus pre-approved UIModalTransitionStyle property of UIViewControllers.

Or you could try what you did up to now and fiddle with the view hierarchy. Maybe you can eliminate your errors simply by using the view controllers sequentially and not jumping around skipping controllers in between. In this case it should be enough to use

[self.navigationController pushViewController:controller animated:YES];

and

[self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES];

rather than the more error prone versions pushToViewController and popToViewController.