I think my problem is best expressed by first giving an outline of what I'm trying to accomplish and then giving my implementation, followed by the problem I've ran into.
I'm attempting to make a profile page within my iOS app that can be instantiated from the Storyboard, given a user ID, and then fetch all the meta data from the server.
In my storyboard, I have designed the ViewController and linked the ImageViews, buttons et cetera as @IBOutlets. The user's (person using the app.) homepage is instantiated by the Storyboard, but the rest are pushed in by code. In order to grab the data, I have a function loadDataForID(ID: Int)
Now, the problem I have is that #instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier(String) returns a UIViewController that I cannot upcast to my ProfileViewController, in order to call the data fetching function.
So, my next thought was to manually create the ProfileViewController, call the helper function and then push the view, but then I ran into another problem: since all the views are @IBOutlets, and this controller wasn't instantiated by the Storyboard, they're all nil references.
As I'm new to iOS development, I'm almost certain there's a better way to implement this, but I'm completely stuck; I don't know where to go from here. Is there a way around these issues or should I do things a different way?
You can cast instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier(String) as ProfileViewController as shown into below code:
let storyboard = UIStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: nil)
let profileVC = storyboard.instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier("ProfileViewControllerID") as! ProfileViewController
//Now you can access property of ProfileViewController here
self.presentViewController(profileVC, animated: true, completion: nil)