Accessing a specific child of an object, especially with UI

Questions & Answers
1

Whats the correct way to access components of child dren or just children themselves of an object within a c# script.

My scenario :

I’m instantiating a list of objects at runtime for a menu and they are all given a parent object, but I’m not sure how to go about getting a specific child of that object to change things such as text components. Also how do I get a specific text object when there are more than one in an object?

I have a basic UI element that you can consider a button, that has multiple text objects that need to be dynamically updated. I instantiate these groups as the game goes to add new different buttons to the menu.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Panel (parent)
→ Panel a (button)
----> Text a
----> Text b
→ Panel b
----> Text a
----> Text b

How do I get text b of panel a specifically?

2

You should have a manager script that stores references to the instantiated UI componenets. The example below stores them in a List.

using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.UI;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class UIManager : MonoBehaviour
{
    [SerializeField]
    private Button          m_buttonPrefab;
    private List<Button>    m_buttons;

    public void Start()
    {
        m_buttons = new List<Button>();

        int noOfElements = 10;
        for(int i = 0; i < noOfElements; i++)
        {
            Button button = GameObject.Instantiate(m_buttonPrefab);
            button.transform.parent = transform;
            m_buttons.Add(button);
        }
    }
}

When instantiating a component that has more than one of the same type underneath it, I would again have some kind of manager for that. For example; if you’re going to be instantiating Buttons that have multiple text component children, create a custom class that stores those pieces of texts;

public class MultiTextButton : Button
{
    [SerializeField]
    private Text[] m_texts;

    public Text GetText(int p_id)
    {
        if (p_id < m_texts.Length)
            return m_texts[p_id];

        return null;
    }
}

Hope this helped, let me know if I’ve misunderstood and I’ll update my solution accordingly.