Reasons for an IBOutlet to be nil

Question

What are the reasons why an IBOutlet (connected) could be nil?

I have one in may application which is always nil, even if I recreate everything from scratch (declaration and control).

Answer 1

It could be that your nib is messed up, but I find a common reason is having two instances where you think you only have one, and the one you're using in your code is not the one you connected.

Answer 2

If you've also defined a loadView method that creates the view, it is possible based on how you initialize it. If you initialize it using alloc-init and the nib name is not the same as class name, then you can have a case where the outlet is nil. But Chuck's answer seems more reasonable to assume.

Answer 3

One reason I just got stung by: If the nib file is not included in the target resource files for some reason (like you had the targets unchecked when you added it to the project), Xcode doesn't throw an error but all the outlets from that nib are going to be null...