How do I pass data from a tab bar controller to one of its tabs?

austin picture austin · May 19, 2012 · Viewed 22.8k times · Source

I have a UITabBarController set up in storyboard. I want to pass a dictionary of data from the tab bar controller for use in the appropriate child tab, which is a standard UIViewController.

This seems like a long questions to answer, but I really don't know where to start. I'm looking for the easiest way through this. Must I make the tabs function programmatically? Pointing me towards any useful developer documentation would also be much appreciated.

-Austin
p.s. i'm new and have so far depended on storyboard for viewcontroller transitions

Answer

austin picture austin · May 25, 2012

It took a couple of days, but I discovered a simple solution. In my TabBarController's viewDidLoad method, I can access and set attributes of my the tabbed subviews using

    [[self viewControllers] objectAtIndex:0]

or whatever index you wish to access.

Saving that as an instance of my tab1_viewController gives me a pointer to the object, from which I can get and set my property values. This was initially unclear because storyboard created the tab_viewController objects for me. I never had a chance to initialize them the way I wanted to!