Question

Brand new to coding; been utilizing stackoverflow religiously for months; first time asking a question; please be gentle.

I’m trying to create a series of UITextFields programmatically using a for loop. The fields should have names like “pax1name”, “pax2name”, “pax3name”, etc.

The piece I’m missing is how to take a string and make it the name of a textField, changing the name of the textField each time the for-loop executes.

Here’s my code, but maybe I’m going about this the wrong way? Thank you in advance!

// set up the names textfields
for (int i = 0; i < 7; i++) {
    NSString *fieldName = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"pax%iname", (i + 1)];

    // I can't figure out what goes here to create a UITextField with the name of fieldName

    textField = [[UITextField alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(15, (15 + (i * 40)), 400, 40)];
    textField.borderStyle = UITextBorderStyleRoundedRect;
    textField.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:15.0];
    textField.autocorrectionType = UITextAutocorrectionTypeNo;
    textField.clearButtonMode = UITextFieldViewModeWhileEditing;
    textField.contentVerticalAlignment = UIControlContentVerticalAlignmentCenter;

    [namesViewController addSubview: textField];

    [fieldName release];
    [textField release];
}

Answer 1

Normally you use the UIView property tag for that. Use [textField setTag:<youCustomTag>] in your loop to set the value, e.g. your variable i. Please note that tag expect an NSUInteger and not an NSString.

To access the correct text field afterwards you’d call [[namesViewController view] viewWithTag:<yourCustomTag>].

BUT, is it really necessary to create multiple text fields for your view controller? There might be a more elegant solution by creating just one single text field and setting the tag-property on demand when the user taps a row. I don’t know if that would work for you.