Newbie iPhone: How do I programatically set the text of a UIBarButtonItem?

Question

Hello,
This is probably really more of a question on IBOutlets but here goes. I want to have an updateable label on my Toolbar. A label doesn't seem to "stick" on the toolbar so I figured I would drop a UIBarButtonItem on it and then just update the Title property of it to change the text as I needed. Problem is I can't figure out how to get a reference to the UIBarButtonItem in my code.
With a pure label control, I can drag from the File's Owner to the label in my view to make it an outlet for my ViewController and then access the text property of the label in code. With the UIBarButtonItem, I can't make it an outlet. I know the button is more of an action thing but I don't need to respond to taps, I just want to change the text.
Thanks for any help,
Tom

Answer 1

Tom,
You should be able to assign the UIBarButtonItem to an outlet as long as:
1) you have defined an instance variable in FilesOwner of UIBarButtonItem and prefixed it with "IBOutlet".
2) FilesOwner is set to your custom view controller in the Interface Builder's Inspector panel. If it still thinks it's a standard UIViewController it won't pick up your custom outlets.
All that being said, I'm not sure you can change the title without using a custom view. The default UIBarButtonItem has an initWithTitle: initializer that may be static (perhaps others know of a way to change it once set). But you can define a custom view for the button. That gives you the ability to add a UILabel and programmatically set the text of the label.
Cheers,
George