ASVisibility
ASDKNavigationController and ASTabBarController both implement the ASVisibility protocol. These classes can be used even without ASDisplayNodes, making them suitable base classes for your inheritance hierarchy. For any child view controllers that are ASDKViewControllers, these classes know the exact number of user taps it would take to make the view controller visible (0 if currently visible).
Knowing a view controller’s visibility depth allows view controllers to automatically take appropriate actions as a user approaches or leaves them. Non-default tabs in an app might preload some of their data; a controller 3 levels deep in a navigation stack might progressively free memory for images, text, and fetched data as it gets deeper.
Any container view controller can implement a simple protocol to integrate with the system. For example, ASDKNavigationController will return a visibility depth of it’s own visibilityDepth + 1 for a view controller that would be revealed by tapping the back button once.
You can opt into some of this behavior automatically by enabling automaticallyAdjustRangeModeBasedOnViewEvents on ASDKViewControllers. With this enabled, if either the view controller or its node conform to ASRangeControllerUpdateRangeProtocol (ASCollectionNode and ASTableNode do by default), the ranges will automatically be decreased as the visibility depth increases to save memory.