How to get global pointer to view controller in swift

Question

I'm building an app using swift. In my app, I need to present a UIPopoverPresentationController, and I also need to acces the content controller from that popover from other methods in my normal view controller.

To do this, I would normally in objective C just create a global pointer to my view controller, which would allow me to access it from any method.

This is how I would do it in Swift:

class Categories: UITableViewController, UIPopoverPresentationControllerDelegate {

let storyBoard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle:nil)
var newCategory = self.storyBoard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("NewCategory") as NewCategory

//rest of my code

When I do this, Xcode gives me the error:

Categories.type does not have a member named 'storyBoard'

Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong and how I need to modify my code to create a legit global pointer to my view controller? Any help would be highly appreciated!

Answer 1

You should use @lazy attribute for this. Bellow is general receipt:

class MyClass {
    let compileTimeProperty = "compileTimePropert"

    @lazy var runTimeProperty:String = {
        return self.compileTimeProperty
    }()
}

And here is how your code should be adjusted:

class Categories: UITableViewController, UIPopoverPresentationControllerDelegate {

    let storyBoard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle:nil)

    @lazy var newCategory: NewCategory = {
        return self.storyBoard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("NewCategory") as NewCategory
    }()

    //rest of your code
}