iPhone: Trouble reading badge value from uitabbaritem

Question

I'm trying to figure out programmatically if a particular tab bar item in my app has a badge.

While I'm debugging, visually, I can plainly see that it does. But when I run this code in the viewController in question:

UITabBarItem* thisVCsTabBarItem = self.tabBarItem;
NSString* badgeValue = thisVCsTabBarItem.badgeValue;

...badgeValue is nil. And when I inspect thisVCsTabBarItem in the debugger, its _badgeValue member is nil.

What's going on here? Should I be doing something differently in trying to read this value from the tab bar item?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I do something like this for a Downloads tab:

for (UITabBarItem* item in self.tabBarController.tabBar.items) {
    if (item.tag == 3) {
        if (downloadCount > 0) {
            item.badgeValue = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"%d", downloadCount];
        } else {
            item.badgeValue = nil;
        }
    }
}

I don't think you are supposed to access the tabBarItem directly. It is better find your item in the tabBarController's items array.

Answer 2

Looking at some code where I use the UITabBarItem badgeValue property, I see that self.tabBarItem.badgeValue returns nil while self.navigationController.tabBarItem.badgeValue returns the correct value. Could that be it?

The thing is that the auto-completion actually gives me tabBarItem after self. Easy to make a mistake because of that.