IBOutletCollection set ordering in Interface Builder

Question

I am using IBOutletCollections to group several Instances of similar UI Elements. In particular I group a number of UIButtons (which are similar to buzzers in a quiz game) a

Answer 1

It seems very random how IBOutletCollection is ordered. Maybe I am not understanding Nick Lockwood's methodology correctly - but I as well made a new project, added a bunch of UILabels, and connected them to a collection in the order they were added to the view.

After logging, I got a random order. It was very frustrating.

My workaround was setting tags in IB and then sorting the collections like so:

[self setResultRow1:[self sortCollection: [self resultRow1]]];

Here, resultRow1 is an IBOutletCollection of about 7 labels, with tags set through IB. Here is the sort method:

-(NSArray *)sortCollection:(NSArray *)toSort {
    NSArray *sortedArray;
    sortedArray = [toSort sortedArrayUsingComparator:^NSComparisonResult(id a, id b) {
        NSNumber *tag1 = [NSNumber numberWithInt:[(UILabel*)a tag]];
        NSNumber *tag2 = [NSNumber numberWithInt:[(UILabel*)b tag]];
        return [tag1 compare:tag2];
    }];

    return sortedArray;
}

Doing this, I can now access objects by using [resultRow1 objectAtIndex: i] or such. This saves overhead of having to iterate through and compare tags every time I need to access an element.