Access buttons individually made by a for loop (old Unity GUI, Unity Editor script)

Question

I've got a problem and I am struggling with this for a couple of days now.

I am making an Editor script and I want to access buttons individually when created by a for loop. There is a public class ButtonNode which stores some variables of the button like name and size.

public class ButtonNode
{
    public bool button;         
    public string name = "O";
    public float sizeW = 25f;

    public void AlterButton()
    {
        name = "P";
    }
}

Then there is my Editor script in which I create the buttons. This is where I get stuck, how do I access these buttons individually? For example, I want to change the name of the button when that button is clicked. How do I do that? Because they are booleans (I don't really know why, this is the legacy GUI) I can't access the transform.name components etc).

public static ButtonNode[] bn = new ButtonNode[10];

void OnGUI()
{
    GUILayout.BeginHorizontal();

    for (int i = 0; i < bn.length; i++)
    {
        bn[i] = new ButtonNode();
        if (bn[i].button = GUILayout.Button(bn[i].name + i, GUILayout.Width(bn[i].sizeW)))
        {
            bn[i].AlterButton();
        }
    }

    GUILayout.EndHorizontal();
}

Answer 1

You are recreating your ButtonNode objects each time, the OnGUI function is being called. You will certainly want to create them at a single point in your application.

You can remove the initialization and set bn = null. You then check in OnGUI if bn == null and create the array and all buttons. The code should then look similar to this:

public static ButtonNode[] bn = null;

void OnGUI()
{
    GUILayout.BeginHorizontal();

    if (bn == null)
    {
        bn = new ButtonNode[10];
        for (int i = 0; i < bn.Length; ++i)
        {
            bn[i] = new ButtonNode();
        }
    }

    for (int i = 0; i < bn.length; i++)
    {
        // this line has to be removed, to avoid recreation of buttons
        // bn[i] = new ButtonNode();
        if (bn[i].button = GUILayout.Button(bn[i].name + i, GUILayout.Width(bn[i].sizeW)))
        {
            bn[i].AlterButton();
        }
    }

    GUILayout.EndHorizontal();
}