Outlets provide a way to reference objects from your interface—the objects you added to your storyboard—from source code files. You create an outlet by Control-dragging from a particular object in your storyboard to a view controller file. This creates a property for the object in your view controller file, which lets you access and manipulate that object from code at runtime. For example, in the second tutorial, you’ll create an outlet for the text field in your ToDoList app to be able to access the text field’s contents in code.
Outlets are defined as
IBOutlet properties.@property (weak, nonatomic) IBOutlet UITextField *textField;
The
IBOutlet keyword tells Xcode that you can connect to this property from Interface Builder.