IBOutletCollection set ordering in Interface Builder

EDIT: Several commenters have claimed that more recent versions of Xcode return IBOutletCollections in the order the connections are made. Others have claimed that this approach didn't work for them in storyboards. I haven't tested this myself, but if you're willing to rely on undocumented behavior, then you may find that the explicit sorting I've proposed below is no longer necessary.

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to control the order of an IBOutletCollection in IB, so you'll need to sort the array after it's been loaded based on some property of the views. You could sort the views based on their tag property, but manually setting tags in IB can be rather tedious.

Fortunately we tend to lay out our views in the order we want to access them, so it's often sufficient to sort the array based on x or y position like this:

- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    [super viewDidLoad];

    // Order the labels based on their y position
    self.labelsArray = [self.labelsArray sortedArrayUsingComparator:^NSComparisonResult(UILabel *label1, UILabel *label2) {
        CGFloat label1Top = CGRectGetMinY(label1.frame);
        CGFloat label2Top = CGRectGetMinY(label2.frame);

        return [@(label1Top) compare:@(label2Top)];
    }];
}

Not sure when this changed exactly, but as of Xcode 4.2 at least, this no longer seems to be a problem. IBOutletCollections now preserve the order in which the views were added in Interface Builder.

UPDATE:

I made a test project to verify that this is the case: IBOutletCollectionTest

It seems very random how IBOutletCollection is ordered. Maybe I am not understanding Nick Lockwood's methodology correctly - but I as well made a new project, added a bunch of UILabels, and connected them to a collection in the order they were added to the view.

After logging, I got a random order. It was very frustrating.

My workaround was setting tags in IB and then sorting the collections like so:

[self setResultRow1:[self sortCollection: [self resultRow1]]];

Here, resultRow1 is an IBOutletCollection of about 7 labels, with tags set through IB. Here is the sort method:

-(NSArray *)sortCollection:(NSArray *)toSort {
    NSArray *sortedArray;
    sortedArray = [toSort sortedArrayUsingComparator:^NSComparisonResult(id a, id b) {
        NSNumber *tag1 = [NSNumber numberWithInt:[(UILabel*)a tag]];
        NSNumber *tag2 = [NSNumber numberWithInt:[(UILabel*)b tag]];
        return [tag1 compare:tag2];
    }];

    return sortedArray;
}

Doing this, I can now access objects by using [resultRow1 objectAtIndex: i] or such. This saves overhead of having to iterate through and compare tags every time I need to access an element.