How do I reference my MainViewController from another class?

Question

I am building an iPhone Utility app that uses UIImageView to display an animation. Within the MainViewController's viewDidLoad() method, I am creating an instance of a CustomClass, and then setting up the animations:

- (void)viewDidLoad 
{
 [super viewDidLoad]; 
 cc = [CustomClass new];

 NSArray * imageArray = [[NSArray alloc] initWithObjects:
          [UIImage imageNamed:@"image-1-off.jpg"],
          [UIImage imageNamed:@"image-2-off.jpg"],
          [UIImage imageNamed:@"image-3-off.jpg"],
          [UIImage imageNamed:@"image-4-off.jpg"],
          nil];
 offSequence = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 320, 480)];
 offSequence.animationImages = imageArray;
 offSequence.animationDuration = .8;
 offSequence.contentMode = UIViewContentModeBottomLeft;
 [self.view addSubview:offSequence];
 [offSequence startAnimating];
}

That works fine. However, I would like to be able to move all the above code that sets up the UIImageView into my CustomClass. The problem is in the second to last line:

[self.view addSubview:offSequence];

I basically need to replace 'self' with a reference to the MainControllerView, so I can call addSubview from within my CustomClass. I tried creating an instance var of CustomClass called mvc and a setter method that takes a reference to the MainViewController as an argument as such:

- (void) setMainViewController: (MainViewController *) the_mvc 
{
 mvc = the_mvc;
}

And then I called it within MainViewController like so:

[cc setMainController:MainViewController:self];

But this yields all sorts of errors which I can post here, but it strikes me that I may be overcomplicating this. Is there an easier way to reference the MainViewController that instanatiated my CustomClass?

TechZen TechZen · Accepted Answer · 2010-06-12T16:20:23

The cleanest way to do this would be to create a subclass of UIImageView and create a customize initializer that accepts the array. So,

@interface MyCustomImageView:UIImageView {
//...
}

-(id) initWithFrame(CGRect) aRect animationImages:(NSArray *) imageArray;
@end

Then in your main view controller just initialize the custom image view, populate it and add it to the subviews. This will make everything nicely encapsulated, modular and reusable.

How do I reference my MainViewController from another class?

1 Answers