UITextView is nil when attempting to set for popover

Question

I have two View Controllers: SavePopOverVC and MainVC . I also have a nib file called SavePopOver . SavePopOver has three items, a UIButton , a UIImage and a UITextView . The image and text view have outlets to property fields in SavePopOverVC called captionImage and captionTextView respectively. The button has an outlet to an IBAction in SavePopOverVC .

In MainVC.m I have the following two lines in my class extension.

SavePopOverVC *spvc;
UIPopoverController *popover;

In my viewDidLoad of the same file I have the following lines relating to my popover.

spvc = [[SavePopOverVC alloc] initWithNibNamed:@"SavePopOver" bundle:nil];
popover = [[UIPopoverController alloc] initWithContentViewController:spvc];

In my function that displays my popover, also in MainVC.m , I have the following lines.

[popover setPopoverContentSize:CGSizeMake(600,200)];
[popover presentPopoverFromRect:_header.frame inView:self.view permittedArrowDirection:UIPopoverArrowDirectionAny animated:YES];
[((SavePopOverVC *)popover.contentViewController).captionTextView setText:@"Some text here"];

However, captionTextView is nil when I make the setText: call. The app doesn't crash but the text isn't set. After the popover is displayed and I click on the UIButton to save the string typed in captionTextView I get the string just fine. So, I know the two are ultimately linked correctly, but how can I set captionTextView from when I display the popover?

If it is worth noting, I'm developing solely for iPad with this one.

Answer 1

It is most likely nil because its view isn't loaded at the time you set the text. Unlike most other modern languages, in Objective-C calling a method on a nil object doesn't cause an exception, it just does nothing.

To solve this, you can create a custom NSString property in your SavePopOverVC , eg

@property (nonatomic, copy) NSString *caption;

Before you call presentPopoverFromRect: , assign a value to this property. Inside SavePopOverVC , override viewDidLoad and set the captionTextView.text = self.caption;

There might be people who disagree with me, but I don't recommend exposing UI controls as properties in a view controller. This behaviour is one of the reasons for that.