UIBarButtonItem: target-action not working?

Question

I\'ve got a custom view inside of a UIBarButtonItem, set by calling -initWithCustomView. My bar button item renders fine, but when I tap it, it doe

Answer 1

I do not think the target and action of the UIBarButtonItem apply to custom views. Try using a UIButton instead of UIImageView and applying the target and action to the button.

Sample code in Swift:

let button  = UIButton(type: .Custom)
if let image = UIImage(named:"icon-menu.png") {
    button.setImage(image, forState: .Normal)
}
button.frame = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 30.0, 30.0)
button.addTarget(self, action: #selector(MyClass.myMethod), forControlEvents: .TouchUpInside)
let barButton = UIBarButtonItem(customView: button)
navigationItem.leftBarButtonItem = barButton

Answer 2

If you do not want to settle with an UIImage and have a custom view in your barbuttonitem, set a tap gesture recognizer to your barbuttonitem's customview property

let tap = UITapGestureRecognizer(target: self, action: #selector(goProButtonPressed)) deviceStatusBarButtonItem.customView?.addGestureRecognizer(tap)

Answer 3

Jacob, everything looks good, however you may not have provided the correct selector.

Can you verify that your action is actually declared

- (void) deselectAll;

and not

- (void) deselectAll:(id)sender;

If it's the latter, you will need to set the action to @selector(deselectAll:). (note the semi-colon to match the method declaration)

Also, void might be IBAction, but that's not relevant to this problem you're having.

Answer 4

Is your custom view eating touch events or passing them on to parent view?

Answer 5

To make this easy to work with, I created a category on UIBarButtonItem which looks like this:

@implementation UIBarButtonItem (CustomButtonView)

- (void)setButtonImage:(UIImage *)image
{
    UIButton * button = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeCustom];
    [button setBackgroundImage:image forState:UIControlStateNormal];
    [button sizeToFit];
    [button addTarget:self.target action:self.action forControlEvents:UIControlEventTouchUpInside];
    self.customView = button;
}

- (UIImage *)buttonImage
{
    return [(UIButton *)self.customView imageForState:UIControlStateNormal];
}

@end

In your client code, simply use:

myBarButtonItem.buttonImage = [UIImage imagedNamed:@"image_name"];

Done this way you can still hook up your targets and actions in IB (pushing as much UI config into IB as you can is a Good Thing).

Answer 6

I had a similar problem. And I initially followed the path suggested by @drawnonward, but then ran into trouble when I tried to have my action present a popover controller on an iPad: Using an embedded UIButton as a custom view means the UIButton is the sender of the event, and the popover controller’s presentPopoverFromBarButtonItem: method crashes when it tries to send it messages which are only appropriate to actual UIBarButtonItems.

The solution I eventually found was to steal the image I wanted to use (the “info” icon) from a throwaway UIButton, and construct my UIBarButtonItem as follows:

// Make the info button use the standard icon and hook it up to work
UIButton *infoButton = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeInfoLight];
UIBarButtonItem *barButton = [[[UIBarButtonItem alloc]        
      initWithImage:infoButton.currentImage
              style:UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered
             target:self
             action:@selector(showInfo:)] autorelease];

Using this initializer yields a bar button whose target and selector actually work. It is also easier than wrapping the image in a custom view, but that is just icing.