Question

How can i gather sent events from a UITextField in one place or am i forced to create outlets and actions for every single event i intend to use?

Answer 1

If I got your question correctly you need to get the text from UITextField when this UITextField loose focus (user taps elsewhere). To achieve this you need:

1. Declare your class as (in yourClassName.h
   file)

2. Implement in yourClassName.m file this method:

   - (void)textFieldDidEndEditing:(UITextField *)textField {
       NSString *someStringOrWhateverYouNeed = textField.text;   
   }
   

Any time user will press return button on keyboard your class will have a notification and call this method.

In case if you need to gather event from multiple UITextFields you can mark all your textField with specific tags and create one IBAction like this:

- (IBAction)getTextFieldEvent:(id)sender {
    UITextField *currentTextField = (UITextField *)sender;
    switch (currentTextField.tag) {
        case 1:
            // some code here for textField with tag = 1
            break;
        case 2:
            // some code here for textField with tag = 2
            break;
        case 3:
            // some code here for textField with tag = 3
            break;
        default:
            // some default code here
            break;
    }
}

For different event types I can suggest to create different IBAction’s. If you do not need to change UITextField’s properties (e.g. font etc.) then you do not really need IBOutlets.

Hope that helps 🙂