IOS UIMenuController UIMenuItem, how to determine item selected with generic selector method

Question

With the following setup

....
MyUIMenuItem *someAction  = [[MyUIMenuItem alloc]initWithTitle : @\"Something\"  action : @selector(menuItemSelected:)];
MyUIMe         


        

Answer 1

Turns out it's possible to obtain the UIButton object (which is actually UICalloutBarButton) that represents UIMenuItem if you subclass UIApplication and reimplement -sendAction:to:from:forEvent:. Although only -flash selector goes through UIApplication, it's enough.

@interface MyApplication : UIApplication
@end

@implementation MyApplication
- (BOOL)sendAction:(SEL)action to:(id)target from:(id)sender forEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
    // target == sender condition is just an additional one
    if (action == @selector(flash) && target == sender && [target isKindOfClass:NSClassFromString(@"UICalloutBarButton")]) {
        NSLog(@"pressed menu item title: %@", [(UIButton *)target titleLabel].text);
    }
    return [super sendAction:action to:target from:sender forEvent:event];
}
@end

You can save target (or any data you need from it) in e.g. property and access it later from your UIMenuItem's action.

And to make your UIApplication subclass work, you must pass its name as a third parameter to UIApplicationMain():

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    @autoreleasepool {
        return UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, NSStringFromClass([MyApplication class]), NSStringFromClass([YOUR_APP_DELEGATE class]));
    }
}

This solution works on iOS 5.x-7.0 as of post date (didn't test on older versions).