Property can not be found in forward class

Question

I got a problem that has been bugging me for a while - especially since it doesn't make any sense to me.

Xcode seems not to find some properties of my objects, even though they are correctly declared. Here some code:

the .h file

@interface Start1ViewController : UIViewController {
    NSString *updatedStatus;
    NSString *updatedTime;
}
@property (retain, nonatomic) NSString *updatedTime;
@property (retain, nonatomic) NSString *updatedStatus;

and the respective synthesize in the .m

#import "Start1ViewController.h"

@implementation Start1ViewController
@synthesize updatedStatus, updatedTime;

I want to access these properties from an object holding an instance of the class above:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
@class Start1ViewController;


@interface PartyPickerViewController : UIViewController {

IBOutlet UIDatePicker *datePicker;
Start1ViewController *start1ViewController;
}  

.m

-(IBAction)buttonPressed:(id)sender{

NSDate *selected =[datePicker date];
NSDateFormatter *timeFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
[timeFormatter setDateFormat:@"HH:mm"];
NSString *dateString = [timeFormatter stringFromDate:selected];
[start1ViewController setUpdatedStatus:@"Party"];
[start1ViewController setUpdatedTime:dateString];
[self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES];
}

Xcode tells me that setUpdatedStatus and setUpdatedTime don't exist..and well they don't work. I tried using start1ViewController.updatedStatus=@"Party"; instead, but this won't build at all saying "property updatedStatus not found on object of class Start1ViewController"

I had this problem before and that time I somehow got it to work by switching between using the .-notation and using the setter methods explicitly several times, but even in that other case where it did work I still got warnings for the methods and the "property not found" when using .notation

The properties in question are simple NSStrings, so I doubt that it might be a problem that the other class doesn't know about the NSString class?

Thanks in advance for any help! =)

Answer 1

Did you import the Start1ViewController.h in PartyPickerViewController.m? Because when you use in your interface @class, you just make a promise to the compiler that there is a class called Start1ViewController. But after that you need to import Start1ViewController.h in your implementation in order to make the Start1ViewController.h, it's properties and methods visible to the other classes.