Question

The bulk of the code for my app is in a ‘m’ file called MyViewController. The app implements a custom UIView which contains a UIWebView object. The code for the UIView and UIWebView is kept in a separate ‘m’ file called CustomUIView.

I have managed to override clicks on URL hyperlinks in the UIWebView object using a delegate. However, I would like to have these clicks launch a method that is stored in my main app code. This method is called “popupView”, and takes a single argument, “inputArgument”. The inputArgument is the text of the URL the user clicks on. In fact, this method is the very same one that causes my custom UIView to launch.

Anyway, what I’d like to do is have my overridden URL clicks cause the popupView method to launch, thus causing another UIView to open on top of the one that was clicked on.

The problem is that the ‘m’ file where the URL clicks are detected can’t see the ‘popupView’ method as it is included in the MyViewController ‘m’ file. How do I call the popupView method from another ‘m’ file?

Answer 1

Directly

1. Declare MyViewController‘s method -popupView: in MyViewController.h.
2. #import MyViewController.h in CustomUIView.m.
3. Give CustomUIView a reference to the [one] instance of MyViewController, for example by way of an @property declared in CustomUIView.h.

For (1), the @interface of MyViewController (in MyViewController.h) should look a bit like this

@interface MyViewController : UIViewController
{
    //....
}
- (void)popupView:(NSString *)urlText;
//....
@end

For (2), UIViewController.m should have the following somewhere near the top

#import "CustomUIView.h"
#import "MyViewController.h"

For (3), the @interface in CustomUIView.h should look something like

@interface CustomUIView : UIView
{
    //....
}
@property (nonatomic, weak) MyViewController *viewController;
@end

This property will need to be set some time after the instance of CustomUIView owned by MyViewController is created. If your CustomUIView is in MyViewController.xib, you can set this property on it by adding the keyword IBOutlet to the property’s declaration like this

@property (nonatomic, weak) IBOutlet MyViewController *viewController;

and pointing this property to "File’s Owner" in the XIB. If instead, you create the CustomUIView programmatically, you can set this property on it as soon as you have initialized it.

Delegate

This, however, is far from being a best practice. It would be much better to make use of the delegate pattern. To do this, you’ll need to

1. Define a delegate protocol.
2. Add a "delegate" @property to CustomUIView.
3. Call the delegate methods on the delegate object at the appropriate times.
4. Implement the protocol in MyViewController.
5. Set the "delegate" @property of the instance of CustomUIView owned by the MyViewController instance to be the MyViewController instance.

Let’s call our delegate protocol something imaginative like CustomUIViewDelegate. For (1), we’ll declare it at the top of CustomUIView.h as follows:

@class CustomUIView;

@protocol CustomUIViewDelegate <NSObject>
- (void)customUIView:(CustomUIView *)customView didSelectURLText:(NSString *)urlText;
@end

Notice that we’ve had to forward declare our class CustomUIView so that the compiler is able to make sense of the type of the first argument in the protocol method customUIView:didSelectURLText:.

For (2), we’ll do something quite similar to (3) above: Your CustomUIView @interface will look something like

@interface CustomUIView : UIView
{
    //....
}
@property (nonatomic, weak) id<CustomUIViewDelegate> *delegate;
@end

Again, if we’re going to set this property in Interface Builder, we’ll need to use the IBOutlet keyword to announce it to IB:

@property (nonatomic, weak) IBOutlet id<CustomUIViewDelegate> *delegate;

For (3), we need to call the delegate method customUIView:didSelectURLText: on our delegate object self.delegate at the appropriate time.

In your question, you wrote

I have managed to override clicks on URL hyperlinks in the UIWebView object using a delegate.

So, let’s say that CustomUIView has an instance method

- (void)didSelectURL:(NSURL *)url
{
    //....
}

which you call when the user selects a link in the UIWebView. The CustomUIView‘s delegate needs to be informed of this:

- (void)didSelectURL:(NSURL *)url
{
    //...
    if ([self.delegate respondsToSelector:@selector(customUIView:didSelectURLText:)]) {
    {
        [self.delegate customUIView:self didSelectURLText:url.absoluteString];
    }
}

Notice that we check first whether the CustomUIView instance’s delegate object implements the selector of interest (customUIView:didSelectURLText:) by calling respondsToSelector: on it.

For (4), we’ll need first to add <CustomUIViewDelegate> to MyViewController‘s @interface declaration and be sure to #import CustomUIView.h into the file where we use the symbol CustomUIViewDelegate. Our MyViewController‘s @interface will look something like this:

#import "CustomUIView.h"

@interface MyViewController : UIViewController <CustomUIViewDelegate>
{
    //....
}
//....
@end

More importantly, we need to implement the CustomUIViewDelegate protocol in MyViewController‘s @implementation; so far we’ve only declared that MyViewController adopts it.

To do this, since our protocol consists of only one method, we’ll need only to add our own implementation of -customUIView:didSelectURLText:. Our MyViewController‘s @implementation will look something like this:

#import "MyViewController.h"

@implementation MyViewController

//....

- (void)popupView:(NSString *)urlText
{
    //....
}

#pragma mark - CustomUIViewDelegate

- (void)customUIView:(CustomUIView *)customView didSelectURLText:(NSString *)urlText
{
    [self popupView:urlText];
}

//....

@end

Finally, for (5), we’ll need to set the delegate property of the instance of CustomUIView owned by the MyViewController instance. I don’t know enough about MyViewController‘s relationship with its CustomUIView instance to do describe how to do this definitively, but I’ll provide an example: I’ll assume that you programmatically, in -[MyViewController loadView] add the CustomUIView as a subview of MyViewController‘s view. So your implementation of -loadView looks a bit like this:

- (void)loadView
{
    [super loadView];
    
    //....
    
    CustomUIView *customView = //....        
    //....
    [self.view addSubview:customView];
    
    //....
    
}

All that remains to do at this point is to set the delegate @property of the local variable customView to self:

customView.delegate = self;

Edit: Updated (5) in light of new information about the relationship between CustomUIView and MyViewController.

In your comment, you write that your CustomUIView is added as a subview of cvc.view where cvc is an instance of CustomUIViewController in CustomUIView‘s method -[CustomUIView show]. On account of this, you note that writing customView.delegate = self; is the same as writing self.delegate = self, which is clearly not what you want to do.

You want to set the CustomUIView‘s delegate property to be the instance of MyViewController. Consequently, your method -[CustomUIView show] should look something like

- (void)show
{
    //....
    [cvc.view addSubview:self];

    self.delegate = mvc;
}

where mvc is the instance of MyViewController.