iPhone OS: Using an NSString variable to specify a property or ivar

Question

I have a program that I want to either hide or show certain UIbuttons depending on certain variables and all the buttons are named incrementally like 'button1, button2, button3.'

So I want to iterate through the buttons but I don't know how to address the button in an assignment statement using an nsstring as a variable inside a dot notation assignment, such as:

 for (int i = 1; i < weekday; i++) {
    int buttonIncrement = 0;
    NSString *tempString = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:
    @"calbutton%i", buttonIncrement];

 self.tempString.hidden = YES;
}

The "tempString" part of the assignment I want to tell it to insert "calbuttonx" where x is the button number.

Can you do this somehow? if so please explain.

Answer 1

Use an array!

---

If you can't use an array, you can reference to a property by string with Key-Value Coding (KVC):

UIButton* button = [self valueForKey:tempString];
button.hidden = YES;

Answer 2

You can also assign a tag to each button in IB and get the button associated with the tag using

- (UIView *)viewWithTag:(NSInteger)tag

as defined on class UIView, for example:

for( int k = 0; k < 5; ++k ) {

    id subview = [self.view viewWithTag: k];

    if( subview ) { 

        ...
    }
}