keeping a UIButton pressed(state selected/highlighted),until another button is pressed?

Question

I have 3 buttons at the bottom of my view controller, btn1 btn2 btn3, I\'m using them instead of the tab bar as it is not possible to entirely customize a tab bar as per my requ

Answer 1

To keep the button selected, you need to call setSelected:YES in the method that your button calls. For example:

- (void) methodThatYourButtonCalls: (id) sender {
        [self performSelector:@selector(flipButton:) withObject:sender afterDelay:0.0];


}

- (void) flipButton:(UIButton*) button {
    if(button.selected) 
        [button setSelected:NO];
    else
        [button setSelected:YES];

}

I know it looks a little weird calling performSelector: instead of just calling [sender setSelected:YES], but the latter never works for me, while the former does!

In order to get the buttons to deselect when a different one is pressed, I suggest adding an instance variable that holds a pointer to the currently selected button, so when a new one is touched you can call flipButton: to deselect the old one accordingly. So now your code should read:

add a pointer to your interface

@interface YourViewController : UIViewController
{
    UIButton *currentlySelectedButton;
}

and these methods to your implementation

- (void) methodThatYourButtonCalls: (id) sender {
    UIButton *touchedButton = (UIButton*) sender;

    //select the touched button 
    [self performSelector:@selector(flipButton:) withObject:sender afterDelay:0.0]; 

    if(currentlySelectedButton != nil) { //check to see if a button is selected...
        [self flipButton:currentlySelectedButton];

    currentlySelectedButton = touchedButton;
}

- (void) flipButton:(UIButton*) button {
    if(button.selected) 
        [button setSelected:NO];
    else
        [button setSelected:YES];

}