Connecting to Superclass Properties with Storyboards

Question

I am converitng a project to Swift with Storyboards. The old version was Objective-C and did not use Storyboards. The original version has a number of ViewControllers that are subclasses of a CoreDataFetchedResultsViewController. In the CoreFetchedResultsViewController class, I have a property for a UITableView that is used in a number of methods. The declaration of the UITableView in the CoreFetchedResultsController superclass is below.

@interface CoreDataFetchedResultsViewController : UIViewController <NSFetchedResultsControllerDelegate, UITableViewDataSource, UITableViewDelegate>  
@property (nonatomic, strong) UITableView *storyTableView;

In the ViewControllers that subclassed the CoreFetchedResultsViewController, I created a tableView and set it to the storyTableView property of the CoreFetchedResultsViewController in the viewDidLoadMethod.

@interface FLOViewController : CoreDataFetchedResultsViewController <FLODataHandlerDelegate, UIActionSheetDelegate> 

viewDidLoad() from the FLOViewController class

- (void)viewDidLoad  
{  
    [super viewDidLoad];  

        self.storyTableView = [[UITableView alloc] initWithFrame: CGRectMake(0, 44, 320.0f, 436.0f) style: UITableViewStylePlain];  
        self.storyTableView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];  
        self.storyTableView.rowHeight = 81;  
        self.storyTableView.separatorColor = [UIColor blackColor];  
        [self.view addSubview: self.storyTableView];  
        self.storyTableView.delegate = self;  
        self.storyTableView.dataSource = self;  
} 

With the tableView connected to the CoreDataFetchedResultsViewController property the tableView did not crash the app.

My trouble occurs when I am using Storyboards. Since I place the tableView on my FLOViewController in the Storyboard, I am not able to connect it to the storyTableView property in the superclass CoreDataFetchedResultsViewController.

What's the best way to connect a Storyboard element to a superclass property? Do you create an outlet in the subclass and then set that property to the superclass property?

class FLOViewController  
{  
@IBOutlet var floViewControllerTableView: UITableView!  

    override func viewDidLoad()  
    {  
        super.viewDidLoad()  
        self.storyTableView = self.floViewControllerTableView  
     }  
} 

This appears to work but is seems wrong to me. It seems as if copying the object is not the best idea. Any help would be appreciated.

Take care,

Jon

Answer 1

Creating an IBOutlet in the superclass is what works best. This way you can connect the tableView directly to this property.

Take care,

Jon