Getting around Subclassing UIView and Using Pictures in Storyboard - objective-c

Question

I'm trying to write my first iPhone app, and I'm running into a sort of design struggle. What I want to do is have a grid of icons and when you touch one, all the icons above and to the left will "activate" and all the ones below and to the right will "deactivate." If an icon is activated it shows one picture, and if it's not activated it shows another.
The problem I have is that I want to assign a gesture recognizer to each one of these individual icons, and when that icon is tapped, it needs to call a function that updates my grid of icons. But in order to properly update, the function needs to pass as arguments the location of the image in the grid and there's no way to call a function with arguments as part of a gesture recognizer.
So really all I need to do is extend UIImageView to hold two extra integers and the grid it's contained in, and then I could have the following code:
imageView.userInteractionEnabled = YES;
UITapGestureRecognizer *tapgr = [[UITapGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:
self action:#selector(handleTap)];
[imageView addGestureRecognizer:tapgr];
:
:
- (void)handleTap
{
[self.grid updateTableFromRow:self.row andCol:self.col
}
So I suppose this is one way of doing it, but I'm told that I'm not supposed to extend classes in Objective-C, that I should build them from the ground up. In this case, I would just make a custom view with all the properties and/or instance variables I need and I would just fill this custom view with the UIImageView.
This is mostly fine, except when it comes to building my Storyboard. I put all the code that manages and creates this table of icons (programmatically) in another custom view, GridOfIconsView. So on the Storyboard I drag out a custom view and set to be a GridOfIconsView, but then I just see a big white rectangle, and I really want to be able to visualize my app in Storyboard. I know that I can drag out actual image files that I use for the icons onto Storyboard and set them to be a custom view, but then how does that work? Is that image just a background to the custom view? Would I be able to change it programmatically? So if the activated image was a green square, but the deactivated was a red one and I initially dragged out red squares to the Storyboard, would I have access to that red square image?
And a more concerning issue is that I want to manage all these icons in a data structure, either as a 2d array (id icons[][]) or a NS(Mutable?)Array of NS(Mutable?)Arrays. Either way, how could I initialize the data structure to contain links to all these? The grid will be probably 8x8 or 10x10, and there's no way I'm going to have 64-100 #propertys connecting these icons. I'm thinking the only way to sensible organize this is programmatically, but then still, how can I visualize it in Storyboard?

Answer 1

First, it's completely fine to extend classes in Objective-C, and it's done all the time. UIView, UIViewController, UIComponent, etc., were all designed specifically to be subclassed and extended.
However, there are two ways you can do this that are much simpler than extending the class. First, you can have your grid as you already do, where each view has a gesture recognizer attached that calls back to a method on the view controller. Then, you can set a tag on each view (or even just use the view's frame for identification), and read that from the callback method (the gesture recognizer is passed back to the callback method). For example, let's say you had a grid of 4x4 views and you simply numbered them starting in the top-left, advancing each column to the right and then each row, from 0 to 11, you could easily identify the view as such:
// The system automatically passes the gesture recognizer as the only parameter
- (void)handleTap:(UIGestureRecognizer)gestureRecognizer
{
NSInteger viewNumber = [[gestureRecognizer view] tag];
// do something with this view
}
The other way you can do it is to have a single gesture recognizer on the parent view, and then in your -handleTap: callback, you'd query the position of the tap in the view. If the position is within the frame of any of your views, you'd know which one and what to do with it. If not, you could ignore it. This solution requires slightly more math, but also requires far less maintenance and far fewer gesture recognizer that need to be wired up. I would recommend this solution over tagging your views.