Programmatically accessing subviews of UIView added in Interface Builder

Question

I have a nib file where I have a view that contains a background image, a button and another image that covers the full screen (a shadow) that needs to be moved to the front. On the view, I'm creating child views, and after creating those and adding them using [self addView] I need to move to the front the shadow image.

I'm currently using the tag attribute to find that view, but I'm thinking there's probably a better way, by means of identifying the subviews I add in Interface Builder by some name.

I tries adding a IBOutlet to connect the subview with its parent, but it didn't work (and made no sense, since the subview is already connected to its parent in some way).

Answer 1

The IBOutlets way should work, and is probably the best way to do it. Make sure you made the proper connection in Interface Builder after you declared them in the .h file.

Answer 2

The iPhone does a lazy loading of view controllers. The nib might not have been loaded in initWithCoder or any init method for that matter as Kendall specified.

viewDidLoad is the preferred place to access anything from the nib if you want to access them before the view is displayed.

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

At what point are you trying to access the subviews? If you try within init of a ViewController, the IBOutlets will be nil. The first method you can get at them is probably viewDidLoad.

The reason it does make sense to do things this way is that IBOutlets are just direct pointers to some component, even if they are already subviews of something else. Just saves a lot of hunting.

Answer 4

Using the Tag is a perfectly valid way to locate specific views, so long as you're using the viewWithTag: method. If you're already using tags, there's no need to change to IBOutlets unless you just don't like calling viewWithTag:.