How to access IBOutlets declared in superclass?

Question

I\'m currently refactoring a couple of view controllers that share a few IBOutlets and IBAction methods. I moved the outlet declarations and the

Answer 1

IB should be able to see outlets from superclasses, I have done this a number of times with no issues. Are you sure you are importing the superclass correctly (using #import instead of @class)? IB needs some way to track back to the superclass.

Answer 2

I'm pretty sure that IB only looks at the actual class you're using to find outlets, and not at superclasses. I think that the easiest solution would be to leave the instance variable declarations in the superclass, but duplicate the @property lines in each subclass.

Answer 3

Switching between the super and subclass in the identity inspector allows you to connect your outlets across the classes. The only issue I found is when you attempt to do this with a UITableViewCell and its subclass. I wanted to re-assign the default textLabel and detailTextLabel instances to labels I create in Interface Builder. The workaround is to create substitute labels and then override the getters to point to these instead.

Answer 4

I ran into a similar problem with a superclass, but it was due to a bug in Xcode (8.2) where Interface Builder doesn't show outlets in the Connection Inspector if those outlets have been declared with a _Nullable type annotation for Swift compatibility.

Using nullable inside @property's parentheses appears to work around the problem.

This Xcode bug seems to affect outlets in any class (ie. not just superclasses).