Adding UITabBarItem to a UITabBar in a UIViewController

Question

So I have a UIViewController that has a UITabBar in the view. I want to pull down JSON and decided what tabs I want to add to the tab bar, so I need to be able to choose the tabs on runtime. I wanted to use the UITabBarController setViewControllers:animated: method to add to it a list of view controllers. However since I am doing this in a view controller I do not know how to gain access to the tab bar's view controller. Here is my code ...

Header

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface HealthTicketTabController : UIViewController <UITabBarDelegate, UITabBarControllerDelegate> {
    NSArray *viewControllers;
    IBOutlet UITabBar *tabBar;
    UIViewController *selectedViewController;

    // How do I link this the the tabBar's view controller???
    UITabBarController *tabBarController;
}

@property (nonatomic, retain) NSArray *viewControllers;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UITabBar *tabBar;
@property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UITabBarController *tabBarController;
@property (nonatomic, retain) UIViewController *selectedViewController;

@end

Source

- (id)init
{
    self = [super initWithNibName:@"HealthTicketTabView" bundle:nil];
    if (self)
    {   
        //Controllers for the tab view
        HealthCardController *card = [[HealthCardController alloc] init];
        MedicalExpensesController *medical = [[MedicalExpensesController alloc] init];

        //Tab bar items to be displayed in the tab bar
        card.tabBarItem = [[UITabBarItem alloc] initWithTabBarSystemItem:UITabBarSystemItemMostViewed tag:0];
        medical.tabBarItem = [[UITabBarItem alloc] initWithTabBarSystemItem:UITabBarSystemItemMostViewed tag:1];

        NSArray *array = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:card, medical, nil];

        //Set the tab bar's view controllers to the list
        tabBarController.viewControllers = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:card, medical, nil];

        [array release];
        [card release];
        [medical release];
    }

    return self;
}

Answer 1

UIViewController has a tabBarController property already. You do not need one in your header file. This is how you can access the UITabBarController.

Answer 2

Found out that since I was using a UIViewController to control the UITabBar I need to set the tab bar's delegate to the current UIViewController and handle the tab events in the current controller.

Adding TabBarItems to the TabBar

[self.tabBar setItems: tabBarItems animated:TRUE];

Switching between ViewControllers

- (void)tabBar:(UITabBar *)tabBar didSelectItem:(UITabBarItem *)item
{
    UIViewController *temp = [viewControllers objectAtIndex:item.tag];
    [self.selectedViewController.view removeFromSuperview];
    [self.view addSubview:temp.view];
    self.selectedViewController = temp;
}