Swift best practice: How to keep track of different objects? - swift

Question

I'm wondering what is a good solution to keep track of different objects of same type.
I have this function:
private extension MenuButtonsViewController {
// TODO: Find a way to find correct button based on MenuItem
func buttonFor(for menuItem: MenuItem) -> EmojiButton? {
guard let subViews = stackView.subviews as? [EmojiButton] else {
return nil
}
let button = buttonFactory.makeEmojiButton(title: menuItem.icon)
for subView in subViews where subView == button {
return subView
}
return nil
}
}
I have an array (UIStackView) with a varying number of buttons (EmojiButton). The buttons are created with content from MenuItem.
I'm looking for a good and clean solution how to find and remove a particular button from the stackView array, based on a MenuItem.
So far I had three ideas:
To create a new object, initalized with same values as the one to remove, and then match using ==. (Solution above). This didn't work.
To add an id to all buttons, and then a corresponding id to the MenuItem object. But this doesn't seem like an elegant solution to have to add that everywhere, and expose this variable from the button object.
Maybe store the button in a wrapper class (like MenuItemButton) with an id to match to, or by storing the MenuItem object so I can match against that.
Any ideas? How is this usually done?

Answer 1

If MenuItem and EmojiButton inherit from UIView, you can make use of the tag property that is available on all UIView's.
You first need to assign a unique tag value to each of your MenuItem's.
You then need to assign this same value to the corresponding Emoji button's tag property. (This would be a good thing to do in your factory.)
Having done that, you can modify your function as follows:
//assumes MenuItem and EmojiButton inherit from UIView
func buttonFor(for menuItem: MenuItem) -> EmojiButton? {
return stackView.viewWithTag(menuItem.tag) as? EmojiButton
}