iPhone SDK: How to get the selected tabitem on a tabbar?

Question

I have this code - (void)tabBar:(UITabBar *)tabBar didSelectItem:(UITabBarItem *)item

What I am looking for is a code snippet that illustrates how to detect which button was pressed inside the delegate presumably using item.

So maybe I have buttons 1 - 4 lined up on the tabbar. My user presses the button position 2. I need to know that so I can bring up a view appropriate for that button.

I tried something like this but it is not working.

NSInteger *barIndex = [[barTab items] IndexofObject:item];

If someone could provide some working example code that would be great.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

when you create your UITabBarItems you'll want to give them each a specific tag. When your - (void)tabBar:(UITabBar *)tabBar didSelectItem:(UITabBarItem *)item method is called, read the tag number out.

NSInteger tag = item.tag;

Using the index of the item is not appropriate for tab bars, since the user can change the order of the tabs.

---

And good practice is to use an enum for each of your tags, so that you don't have a bunch of "random" numbers scattered throughout your code.

typdef enum {
  JPButton1,
  JPButton2,
  JPButton3
} JPButtonType

and then in your tabBar:didSelectItem: method you can test the tags like so:

if (item.tag == JPButton1) {
  // do some stuff with button one here
}

Answer 2

I realize this question is quite old, but maybe this will help someone in the future:

The UITabBarController has a property called selectedIndex. For example, if the UITabBarController is declared as myTabBar, you can always get the currently selected tab index by calling

[myTabBar selectedIndex]

it will be equal to 0 for the first tab, 1 for the second, and so on...

Answer 3

I know this post is over to years old now but you were on the right line instead of using

NSInteger *barItem = [[tabBar items] indexOfObject:item];

you need to use

int barItem = [[tabBar items] indexOfObject:item];

This is because

indexOfObject:item 

will return an int not an NSInteger.