How to fire uibarbuttonitem click event programmatically

Not knowing the current bar button item action you can invoke it this way:

[barButtonItem.target performSelector:barButtonItem.action]

This will however bring "unknown selector" compiler warning, but this may be worked around.

I've read the accepted answer and it is awfully DANGEROUS. you should never suppress such warnings in order to shortcut the path to your desired result!

the safest way to do so:

SEL selector=barButton.action;
id target=barButton.target;
  if(selector && target){
     IMP imp = [target methodForSelector:selector];
     void (*func)(id, SEL) = (void *)imp;
     func(target, selector);
  }

Please read the original post here: performSelector may cause a leak because its selector is unknown

Another way to do that and avoiding warnings is as follows:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] sendAction:barButtonItem.action
                                           to:barButtonItem.target
                                         from:nil
                                     forEvent:nil];

@ton1n8o 's solution worked for me. Here is the implementation in swift:

UIApplication.sharedApplication().sendAction(barButtonItem.action, to: barButtonItem.target, from: nil, forEvent: nil)