Is there a perl-ish like ability to dynamically create objects and actions?

without a ton of ifdef statements or a massive switch.

usually barButtons are defined like

func f1(barButtonItem: UIBarButtonItem){ "do stuff here"}

I see no way like perl does to convert the string into a virtual system command.

a[0]-> create button, name it "f1", set a background image "f1.png", set a color, "f1" and call an action named f1

It really depends on what you mean by action. In classic Cocoa terms that’d be a target/action pair, and you can certainly set that up via Swift. For example, in this code:

func buttonWithName(name: String) -> UIBarButtonItem {
    return UIBarButtonItem(title: name, style: .Plain, target: self, action: Selector(name + "Action:"))
}

override func viewDidLoad() {
    self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = self.buttonWithName("f1")
}

func f1Action(sender: AnyObject) {
    NSLog("f1")
}

the

viewDidLoad()

f1Action()

A lot of other wacky dynamic things are possible in Swift, but you do have to get creative. If you’d like more hints, you should post a more concrete description of your requirements.

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Keep in mind that Swift is a compiled language, and Perl is usually an interpreted language.

So you can take this sequence:

a[0]-> create button, name it "f1", set a background image "f1.png", set a color, "f1" and call an action named f1

go through and write code to perform each of those actions under the appropriate conditions (either as one statically coded sequence, or as a sequence of independent steps), and then have

a[x] -> a token or sequence of tokens

and then process those tokens to achieve dynamic behavior. Having all of the buttons use the same action handler, figure out which element of the array they are, and then process the proper sequence of tokens is entirely feasible.

But you've got to define the various behaviors ahead of time, you don't get to just put arbitrary strings in a database and call eval() to do arbitary things.

Hi, thanks for the help.

Say I wanted build the command from variables?

for n in list

func $arrayA[n] (barButtonItem: UIBarButtonItem){ eval (`grab dB command strings for $A[n] `) }

done

=> which would return the evaluated swift code

func f22(barButtonItem: UIBarButtonItem){ "create bar button that does something "}

Thanks for the rely, good stuff.

I like eval().

ok so i used tag ids to create a non-uniform, somewhat sparse matrix.

is there an efficient way to use UIBarButtonItemGroup to allocate specific indices to specific toolbars?