UICollectionView and UITableView to work in UIViewController

It's impossible to help with the amount of information you've given. If you're having problems with code, post the code that reproduces the problem.

Your VC doesn't have to be a UICollectionViewController (or UITableViewController). I almost never use those myself. It can be a plain UIViewController subclass and just has to conform to the data source and delegate protocols. And as you mentioned, yes of course you have to set the VC as the table / collection view's delegate and data source. You can do this in IB (right click on table or collection view; drag from the '+' by the dataSource and delegate outlets to your VC) or in code (e.g. self.myTableViewAssumingThatIsWhatINamedTheOutlet.delegate = self).

Sorry, I have a UIViewController as the superclass and the UICollectionView (not UICollectionViewController) as a subclass and a UITableView (not UITableViewController) as another subclass.

I have created the prototype cell in the UICollectionView with a UILabel inside. Custom class for UICollectionView is set to BtnCollectionView and the custom class for the Cell is set to BtnCollectionViewCell.

BtnCollectionViewCell.swift

import UIKit

class BtnCollectionViewCell: UICollectionViewCell {
     @IBOutlect var btnLabel:UILabel!
}

BtnCollectionView.swift

import UIKit

private let reuseIdentifier = "Cell"

class BtnCollectionView: UICollectionView {
     var BtnLabels = [...] // Array of 25 text strings

     func numberOfSectionsInCollectionView(collectionView: UICollectionView) -> Int {
          return 1
     }

     func collectionView(collectionView: UICollectionView, numberOfItemsInSection section: Int) -> Int {
          return BtnLabels.count
     }

     func collectionView(collectionView: UICollectionView, cellForItemAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UICollectionViewCell {
          let cell = collectionView.dequeueReusableCellWithReuseIdentifier(reuseIdentifier, forIndexPath: indexPath)

          // ERROR - "Value of type UICollectionViewCell has no member btnLabel"
          cell.btnLabel.text = UILabel()
     }

This is all basic code but the last line of code in the BtnCollectionView does not recognise the btnLabel. I'm not sure why? I do have another class of FirstViewController, this is the class for the superclass (UIViewController) in the storyboard. Does this make any more sense.

Some of it makes sense 😀

The error you're seeing is because the dequeueReusableCell... method returns a UICollectionViewCell. You have to cast it to your subclass by adding "as! BtnCollectionViewCell" at the end. Of course this would crash at runtime if the cell is not an instance of that class, but if everything is set up correctly that will never happen.

You might have some other issues to fix such as trying to assign a UILabel object to a property of type String but one thing at a time 🙂

Thank you for your help. However I have had to move away from using the UICollectionView, and I have switched to using 25 buttons instead.