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iOS

Posted by Bryan Krossley
Bryan Krossley
1,644 Points

Programmatically Call Action

Hi, Is it possible to call an IBAction programmatically?

Thanks, Bryan

2 Answers

Michael Hulet
Michael Hulet
47,913 Points

Sure. Just call the method that the IBAction invokes on its own. For example, in one of my apps, I have this IBAction and the following UIButton defined:

@property (strong, nonatomic) IBOutlet UIButton *facebookButton;
-(IBAction)postToFacebook:(UIButton *)sender;

I could later call this in my code like this:

[self postToFacebook:self.facebookButton];

If you define the IBAction as taking no arguments, then you don't even need to define the IBOutlet to its trigger (in this case, a UIButton)

Bryan Krossley
Bryan Krossley
1,644 Points

I should have mentioned that I am using swift. Here is my action and outlet

    @IBAction func orangeBtnPressed(sender: UIButton) {
        buttonNumberIndex = [0]
        playerNumberCatcher()

    }

@IBOutlet weak var orangeBtnPicked: UIButton!
Michael Hulet
Michael Hulet
47,913 Points

Okay, I just started the Swift course this morning, so I'm far from fluent in it (you'll probably have to edit this a little), but the concepts are mostly the same. You just call the IBAction's function and pass in the corresponding trigger as the sender. In this case, I think it would be something like this:

orangeBtnPressed(sender: orangeBtnPicked)

Essentially, what I'm trying to say is that an IBAction is just like any other function (in fact, IBActions and IBOutlets don't actually exist. They're just there so Interface Builder knows what you're talking about when you're moving stuff around on your .storyboard file, but the compiler totally ignores those keywords, just like it would a comment). Because it's just like any other function, you can call it anytime you want like any other function. In this case, it requires a sender as a parameter, so it's just easiest to pass in the trigger object that would normally be passed in

Bryan Krossley
Bryan Krossley
1,644 Points
Bryan Krossley
Bryan Krossley
1,644 Points

Thanks for the tip. Here is what worked

 orangeBtnPressed(orangeBtnPicked)
Michael Hulet
Michael Hulet
47,913 Points

Awesome. Glad I could help