Unable to subclass UILabel: Unrecognized selector sent to UILabel

Question

I'm using CocoaPods to import some things. Right now I'm trying to use TTTAttributedLabel, which is a rich subclass of UILabel, allowing for URL-clicking etc.

Now, I'm having trouble getting my app to recognise that my labels are actually instances of TTTAttributedLabel, and not regular UILabel's.

In my .xib, I have dragged a regular UILabel into my view, then edited the class of the label like this:

It did autocomplete the name for me, so I know it knows about the class. Then, I have dragged a connection from the xib to the view's class, like this:

It specifies itself as a TTTAttributedLabel automatically, because it recognises that that's what it is, or else it would've said UILabel.

Since I've specified use_frameworks! in my podfile, I have to import the class, so in the top of my view's class, I have import TTTAttributedLabel.

Now, when I try to use the label, it autocompletes likes this: With the correct class, TTTAttributedLabel. But when I do this:

print("labBody: ", labBody)

it prints out this:

labBody:  <UILabel: 0x7fa754c86710; frame = (16 459; 42 21); text = 'Label'; opaque = NO; autoresize = RM+BM; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <_UILabelLayer: 0x60000029cf20>>

thinking it's a UILabel. If I try to access any of the TTTAttributedLabel-specific variables or functions, it still autocompletes them for me:

labBody.enabledTextCheckingTypes = NSTextCheckingResult.CheckingType.link.rawValue

But when using these on runtime, the entire app crashes, saying this:

 -[UILabel setEnabledTextCheckingTypes:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x7fdfc7c59300

Am I blind? Why is this not working? This is what I've always been doing. I might be having a hard Tuesday.. I have tried all the regular stuff, cleaning, deleting derived data, restarting Xcode, deleting the app from the device before running again..

I have even used TTTAttributedLabel before, I know it works. The only thing that's new is that this is my first time using use_frameworks!.. Does that affect the .xib? Making it unable to know about the subclass, or something..?

Answer 1

I have no idea exactly why this worked, but I assume it has something to do with this pod being in Objective-C and something about binding and loading Obj-C stuff..

Anyway, all I had to do was to wrap the object in a new local class. and then change the class of my labels in the .xib-file to this class instead of TTTAttributedLabel (and the outlets in my view's class, obviously).

No need to do anything else than creating this class, it doesn't need to contain anything.

I did read something about setting a flag, like a load ObjC-flag, I didn't try it. I thought that that solution might also load a lot of other Object-C stuff I didn't need/want to load..