iOS Quick tip — How to duplicate a UIButton using Swift

Recently, a feature required that we create a copy of a UIButton. The duplicated UIButton needed to look the same as the original, and targets/actions set on the original UIButton needed to be set on the duplicate.

On iOS, if an object conforms to the NSCopying protocol, we can arbitrarily create copies of it. Unfortunately, UIButton does not conform to this protocol.

Luckily, there is a way around this. Since UIButton (which is a UIView) can be archived, we can use NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver to create an NSData object representing our UIButton, and then de-serialize this object to get an identical duplicate of the original UIButton.

Then, once we have our identical looking UIButton, all we need to do is copy over all the target/action pairs from the original UIButton to our duplicate.

Below is a small Swift UIButton extension providing an implementation of the above aproach.

That’s it! 📱🚀👍🏽

Also available on petethedeveloper.com