Question

I am trying to tidy up my UI by consolidating various things in a Tool Bar, and am utterly confused. I am using Interface Builder rather than constructing the controls programmatically, because my UI is fairly simple and not particularly dynamic.

What I did did so far:

1. Added an empty tool bar.
2. Dragged two previously existing and working buttons onto the tool bar. They changed their class from UIButton
   to UIBarButtonItem, and the inspector now shows them as having no
   Sent Actions or Referencing Outlet, but the the previous action &
   outlet in the View Controller – responding to taps, setting the
   label of the button – still work.
3. Created a new Button directly
   in the tool bar. Wired up its action & outlet by ctrl-drag in the
   normal way. The inspector shows the Action and Outlet for this
   button as connected, which is nice, but sadly neither of them works.
   Clicking the button does not invoke the action; setting the label of
   the button does not cause anything to happen on the screen, even
   after I tried prodding the tool bar with a setNeedsDisplay.

I’m not sure what to try next. Googling has shown me that I’m not the only person to find using UIToolBar via Interface Bulder difficult and confusing, but I haven’t found a solution to my exact problem.

I don’t particularly want to resort to creating my entire GUI programmatically just to tidy up a few buttons. Creating all the controls in Interface Builder outside the tool bar, getting them wired up and working, then moving them into the tool bar would presumably also work – but it would be a kludge, and would leave me still none the wiser if anything went wrong later.

Answer 1

Should you try using UIBarButtonItem instead of UIButton? It works for me.