how to programmatically fake a touch event to a UIButton?

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I'm writing some unit tests and, because of the nature of this particular app, it's important that I get as high up the UI chain as possible. So, what I'd like to do is programmatically trigger a button-press, as if the user had pressed the button in the GUI.

(Yes, yes -- I could just call the IBAction selector but, again, the nature of this particular app makes it important that I fake the actual button press, such that the IBAction be called from the button, itself.)

What's the preferred method of doing this?

9 Answers

Swift 5:

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    @IBOutlet weak var theTextfield: UITextField!
    @IBOutlet weak var someButton: UIButton!
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        theTextfield.text = "Pwd"
        someButton.sendActions(for: .touchUpInside)
    }

    @IBAction func someButtonTap(_ sender: UIButton) {
        print("button tapped")
    }
}

It's handy for people who write Unit Tests without UI Tests ;-)

Swift 5 way to solve it for UIBarButtonItem, which does not have sendAction method like UIButton etc.

extension UIBarButtonItem {
    func sendAction() {
        guard let myTarget = target else { return }
        guard let myAction = action else { return }
        let control: UIControl = UIControl()
        control.sendAction(myAction, to: myTarget, for: nil)
    }
}

And now you can simply:

let action = UIBarButtonItem(title: "title", style: .done, target: self, action: #selector(doSomething))
action.sendAction()
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