Cast an instance of a class to a @protocol in Objective-C

You can cast it like this:

if([self.myViewController conformsToProtocol:@protocol(MyProtocol)])
{
    id<MyProtocol> p = (id<MyProtocol>)self.myViewController;
    [p protocolMethod];
}

This threw me for a bit, too. In Objective-C, the protocol isn't the type itself, so you need to specify id (or some other type, such as NSObject) along with the protocol that you want.

The correct way to do this is to do:

if ([self.myViewController conformsToProtocol:@protocol(MyProtocol)])
{
        UIViewController <MyProtocol> *vc = (UIViewController <MyProtocol> *) self.myViewController;
        [vc protocolMethod];
}

The UIViewController <MyProtocol> * type-cast translates to "vc is a UIViewController object that conforms to MyProtocol", whereas using id <MyProtocol> translates to "vc is an object of an unknown class that conforms to MyProtocol".

This way the compiler will give you proper type checking on vc - the compiler will only give you a warning if any method that's not declared on either UIViewController or <MyProtocol> is called. id should only be used in the situation if you don't know the class/type of the object being cast.