Accessing UI Input elements as I would in HTML - objective-c

Question

I am dumping multiple inputs into a view. They consist of UITextFields UIPickerViews and UIDatePickers.
Each of them have an ID and a Key that need to be saved when the input value is saved. So when the 'Save' button is clicked, I need to loop through and store something like:
{
ID: 'inputid',
Key: 'yearly',
Value: (UITextField value)
}
In HTML, I would just add these values to the input (<input type="text" id="inputid" name="yearly" />) and then loop through each one using $(input).attr('id') etc.
In Objective-C, the only way I can think to do this is to keep a hashtable of this information when I draw the inputs, and then store some kind of identifier against the 'tag' field of the UITextField, then read that by getting all of the inputs from a view and comparing them to the hashtable.
Is this the right way to go about it?? Am I missing something simple here? How would you go about it?
EDIT
To better frame the situation, the number of UITextFields on the page is being pulled from an XML file, therefore I don't know how many UITextFields there will be (so can't assign them to the controller necessarily)
I need something along the lines of:
foreach(var question in ArrayOfQuestions) {
UITextField *textField = [[UITextField alloc] initWithFrame:];
textField.attributes["id"] = question.Id;
textField.attributes["key"] = question.Key;
}
and in the save method
foreach(var textField in UIView) {
textField = (UITextField)textField;
NSString *id = textField.attributes["id"];
NSString *key = textField.attributes["key"];
}
This maybe something I could find in google but can't think of the right search terms and keep coming up empty handed. On the same level, if you can better describe my request please update the title of my question

Answer 1

I think you are actually at the best solution, in regards to the hash table (NSDictionary) of attribute data. It is really a bad design decision to have too much semantic data in the view object itself, as it has nothing to do with the view.
What you need to do concretely in code is the following:
To set up your views & attribute data:
UIView *containerView; // The view that contains your UITextViews.
NSMutableDictionary *attributes; // A dictionary mapping tags to questions.
NSMutableArray *arrayOfQuestions; // The questions that you've parsed from a file or whatever.
// ...
// Each "question" would be of the form #{ #"id" : ____, #"key" : ____ }
for (NSDictionary *question in arrayOfQuestions) {
UITextField *textField = [[[UITextField alloc] initWithFrame:aFrame] autorelease];
[containerView addSubview:textField];
textField.tag = getATag(); // However you want to tag them.
// Fancy new objective-C container/object-literal syntax :)
attributes[#(textField.tag)] = question;
}
Then for your "save" method:
for (UIView *childView in containerView.subviews) {
if ([childView isKindOfClass:[UITextView class]]) {
// We know the class and can thus safely typecast the UIView.
UITextField *textField = (UITextField *)childView;
NSDictionary *aQuestion = attributes[#(textView.tag)];
// Now you can access the id and key properties of the question.
// ... Whatever else you want to do.
}
}
The enumerated loop over the subviews is I think the big thing you were looking for here. It is very similar to the way that you would do it in jQuery with selectors.

Answer 2

If you make each of the elements a property of the view controller, you can access them directly from anywhere and get the current value.
So in the method attached to the save button, you can get the current string value of a UITextField like this, for example:
NSString *currentTextFieldString = self.someTextField.text;