Accessing Programatic View from the ViewController? - ios

Question

Im building my views programatically, but need to refer to the views in my controller for setting properties. I cant see a way to achieve this?
I have a reference to the view as of course the controller inits it, but then i cant access properties for example trying self.view.textField as id thought i would.
How do I achieve this? And vice versa how do I do things like setting the views textField to use the controller as its delegate to handle its input?
First time ive not used storyboard where all this was simpler but messier, appreciate any clarification on these issues

Answer 1

It's easy.
Initialize your UI elements directly in UIViewController.
For example:
private let yourLabel: UILabel = {
let label = UILabel()
label.text = "Text"
label.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
return label
}()
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
setupViews()
}
private func setupViews() {
view.addSubview(yourLabel)
// Setup constraints for yourLabel
}
Then access yourLabel anywhere in the controller code. It works for all the UI components.
NOTE!
You can setup all the views not in the controller, but in a separate view. And then add only one view (with other subviews inside) to the controller. You will have access to all subviews using this one view. But the way how you create UI components in the separate view will be the same:
let yourSubView: UILabel = { // any UI component
let label = UILabel()
label.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
return label
}()
Example of a custom separate UIView:
class CustomView: UIView { // Separate view. Doesn't make the controller massive
let yourSubView: UILabel = { // any UI component
let label = UILabel()
label.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
return label
}()
override init(frame: CGRect) {
super.init(frame: frame)
setupViews()
}
required init?(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
fatalError("init(coder:) has not been implemented")
}
public func setupViews() {
addSubview(yourSubView)
// Setup yourSubView constraints
}
}
Then you can add CustomView to UIViewController and access all the subviews of CustomView.