Why am I getting an error for this?

Answer 1

Your object (TableViewController) has no property named jokeTableView.

In order to access jokeTableView with the special dot operator, it needs to be a property. Otherwise you have to access it using Key-Value-Coding compliant methods or directly using the -> operator (or just use it as an ivar and no reference to self):

jokeTableView.delegate = self;

or

self->jokeTableView.delegate = self;

or

[self jokeTableView].delegate = self;

or

@property (retain) UITableView *jokeTableView;
// later...
self.jokeTableView.delegate = self;

Also note, however, that you are setting an outlet in the initializer and this won't work. You'll have to set this in the -[TableViewController awakeFromNib] method since self->jokeTableView will be nil when the initializer is actually called (which happens in IB prior to serializing the object into the nib file).

Answer 2

Since you are doing this at init time, the outlets should be NULL, so this initialization shouldn't do anything. This should be done at awakeFromNib time at the earliest.