Back to RootViewController from Modal View Controller

I had the same requirement but was using custom segues between the view controllers. I came across with the concept of "Unwind Segue" which I think came with iOS6. If you are targeting iOS6 and above these links might help: What are Unwind segues for and how do you use them? http://chrisrisner.com/Unwinding-with-iOS-and-Storyboards Thanks.

I had a similar situation, where I had a number of view controllers pushed onto the navigation controller stack, and then the last view was presented modally. On the modal screen, I have a Cancel button that goes back to the root view controller.

In the modal view controller, I have an action that is triggered when the Cancel button is tapped:

- (IBAction)cancel:(id)sender
{
    [self.delegate modalViewControllerDidCancel];
}

In the header of this modal view controller, I declare a protocol:

@protocol ModalViewControllerDelegate
- (void)modalViewControllerDidCancel;
@end

And then the last view controller in the navigation stack (the one that presented the modal view) should implement the ModalViewControllerDelegate protocol:

- (void)modalViewControllerDidCancel
{
    [self dismissViewControllerAnimated:NO completion:nil];
    [self.navigationController popToRootViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}

This method above is the important part. It gets the presenting view controller to dismiss the modal view, and then it pops back to the root view controller. Note that I pass NO to dismissViewControllerAnimated: and YES to popToRootViewControllerAnimated: to get a smoother animation from modal view to root view.