Swift - IBOutletCollection equivalent

Question

Update: This works properly in Xcode now - "Outlet Collection" is one of the connection options in Interface Builder, which creates something that looks like:

@IBOutlet var labelCollection: [UILabel]!

---

While we're waiting for a fix, you can approximate this using a computed property. Let's say my view has five UILabels that I want in a collection. I still have to declare each one, but then I also declare a computed property that collects them:

class MyViewController {
    @IBOutlet var label1 : UILabel
    @IBOutlet var label2 : UILabel
    @IBOutlet var label3 : UILabel
    @IBOutlet var label4 : UILabel
    @IBOutlet var label5 : UILabel
    var labels: UILabel![] { return [label1, label2, label3, label4, label5] }

Kind of annoying, but from then on we can treat the labels property as if it were an IBOutletCollection, and won't have to change the rest of our code once the bug is fixed:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    for (index, item) in enumerate(self.labels) {
        item.text = "Label #\(index)"
    }
}

Use:

@IBOutlet var lineFields: [UITextField]!

Then control-drag from UITextField elements to lineFields in order.

@IBOutlet var buttons : [UIView]!

then drag it from the connections inspector in the interface builder or whatever metod you usually use for that

EDIT

This was fixed in a later Beta release of Swift - there's now in IBCollection option in the interface builder.

---

For early Beta releases of Swift:

I came across the same problem: in the release notes of Beta 2 you find the following statement:

Interface Builder does not support declaring outlet collections in Swift classes

I solved this the following way (easy to customize):

class CardGameViewController: UIViewController {
  @lazy var cardButtons : UIButton[] = {
    var tempBtn: UIButton[] = []
    for v:AnyObject in self.view.subviews {
      if v is UIButton {
        tempBtn.append(v as UIButton)
      }
    }
    return tempBtn
  }()
...

Basically, it loops through all the subviews and checks if one is a UIButton. In that case it gets added to a temporary array. This temporary array is then used to lazy instantiate the cardButtons array. For all details, check: Matchismo: Objective-C to Swift