I recently reorganized a window that contained a large number of NSTextFields to instead use a single NSTabView, along with a couple of push buttons (OK, Cancel, etc). Previously, I had managed the tabbing order between fields by setting the nextKeyView of each field to point to the appropriate next tab. I'd also added the following to the View Controller containing all the fields:
- (void)windowDidLoad {
[super windowDidLoad];
MyViewController *vc = (MyViewController *) self.contentViewController;
self.window.initialFirstResponder = vc.YearTextField;
}
This worked really great and I was able to cycle through all the text fields in the order that I had defined in Interface Builder.
With the fields still in MyViewController, but now spread between a half dozen tabs of the NSTabView, the tab order is back to Cocoa's weird left-to-right tabbing algorithm.
I did reset nextKeyView for each of the text field, starting with the first field on each tab, linking to each subsequent field, then setting nextKeyView for the last field back to the first field on that tab. I suspect, however, that something has to change with the initialFirstResponder which (as above) has been setup when the View Controller loads.
Where/How should I manage the initialFirstResponder so that the field tabbing order is correct for each of the tabs in my NSTabView?
Thanks!
Related
In my Cocoa app, I have a window that contains an NSTextField (as is) and an NSScrollView (sub-classed). I've got an NSViewController that manages the window's NSView containing the text field and scrolling view.
At app startup, the NSTextField has focus, and typing enters characters into that text box. When I hit the TAB key, it loses focus. But nothing else in the interface, like the NSScrollView, gains focus. I can't tell where any key down events are going.
How does one transfer focus to the NSScrollView, so that key down events can affect it (e.g., arrow keys, implicit searching, etc.)?
First, you should try hitting Tab repeatedly to see if focus ever makes it to the scroll view or comes back around to the text field.
You don't say what's in the scroll view as the document view. Rather than having the scroll view itself accept focus, it's more common that the document view or one of its descendant views accepts focus. Then, the movement keys would be delivered to that and, if nothing consumes them, they'd bubble up the responder chain to the scroll view and it would handle them automatically.
If you really want your scroll view to accept focus, you need to override the -acceptsFirstResponder method to return YES.
The behavior of Tab is governed by the window. It maintains a key view loop. It can automatically recalculate the key view loop as views are added and removed. That's probably the most reliable way. See the autorecalculatesKeyViewLoop property.
Alternatively, you can manually tell it to recalculate as you desire, by turning off autorecalculatesKeyViewLoop and calling -recalculateKeyViewLoop.
Or, you can explicitly set up the key view loop yourself by connecting each view's nextKeyView and previousKeyView properties, either in code or in Interface Builder.
I'm working on a project which needs a special text field to edit byte values. My current solution is a dedicated readonly textfield and a "..." button to open a popover as shown in the image below:
Now I try to make my solution more user friendly. My goals are these:
If the text field gets the first responder status, the popover automatically opens.
The complete text is selected.
If the user leaves the text field with tab or selecting any field outside of the popover, the popover should automatically close.
If the user types any valid number and suffix the byte value is updated (e.g. "10 GB")
Currently I'm a little bit clueless. My questions are these:
Where is the best location to detect in in the subclass when the text field got first responder?
How can I detect when the field resigns being first responder?
Are there other, simpler solutions?
I could implement everything using - (BOOL)becomeFirstResponder as a hook to display the popover and observing the first responder to automatically hide the popover:
- (void)viewDidMoveToWindow
{
[super viewDidMoveToWindow];
[self.window addObserver:self forKeyPath:NSStringFromSelector(#selector(firstResponder)) options:0 context:NULL];
}
As a start point, I published a working project with the classes on GitHub (MIT License):
Project on GitHub
So if I have an NSView based tableview and inside the views are NSTextViews which are non-editable but selectable...
how can I get that nice functionality of command-A selects all the text? I don't mean row selection. I have row selection disabled for the tableview. I mean highlighting the text in blue so you can copy it to your clipboard. But not just 1 NSTextView's text from one row, all of them from all the rows.
And in addition to command-A click and drag should do this too. But out of the box it seems I can only select one row's text. Here is video showing problem:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2510380/table.mov
(i keep clicking and dragging but can't highlight text on the next row)
here are two mac apps (skype and gabble) that do this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2510380/skype.mov
and
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2510380/gabble.mov
Assuming they are NOT using WebViews with just HTML inside, how do you get this control over the clipboard? i.e. in Skype you select the text and only the conversation is highlighted, not the timestamp of each message. Also the text copied to the clipboard is formatted very nicely. Can you point me in the right direction to reverse engineer skype?
Unfortunately there's no way to do this easily. This is because only ONE control can be the first responder at a time. This means that, though you can have selection in multiple text views, there are several problems:
Only one text view's text will actually be highlighted with the "live" highlight color; the others will have the gray highlight of non-focused controls.
Copy commands will only apply to the first responder text view.
Drag session starts will be initiated from the control the mouse was actually pointing at (irrespective of first responder) and will only drag that control's text.
In a view-based table view, the controls may not even "exist" for a row not currently displayed, so it'll never get the message unless you forcibly create each row, which could be costly for a large table.
Knowing all this, you might be able to "fake it" by having your controller be complicit in a text view and table view subclass's special handling of a select-all message when it's first responder. On receiving this message, the text view subclass can call super then notify the controller (to get its default behavior AND to let you know it happened), at which point the controller can turn around and send the command to all (existing) text views. Highlighting can be spoofed by overriding the text view's drawing and a drag initiation could defer to a delegate (the controller), which would handle writing ALL the strings from your model to the pasteboard (not even touching the text views in possibly-nonexistent row views). The table view subclass would simply pass the same select-all message to the controller without calling super (and even forcibly making sure nothing is selected before returning for good measure).
I hope this helps. If I've forgotten any of your requirements, let me know.
Try like this:-
First create button programatically then write this code after you create button and also write this code in your load method or awakefromnib method.
NSButton *Buttn=// alloc initwithframe;
[Buttn setKeyEquivalentModifierMask:
NSCommandKeyMask];
[Buttn setKeyEquivalent:#"A"];
[Buttn
setAction:#selector(yourmeth:)];
[Buttn setTarget:self];
// now when you press cmd a write
below code in action method
- (void)selectRowIndexes:(NSIndexSet
*)indexes byExtendingSelection:
(BOOL)extend
Okay gang, I'm scratching my head on how to accomplish this one so I wanted to put it out to the world at large.
Essentially what a client wants is a way to toggle PART of a view based on whether the user selects a "Yes" or "No" option. My question is how would I go about accomplishing that?
Allow me to provide some more details. Within this specific app resides a form (a form with custom text fields, picker views, switches, sliders and other UI elements) that have all been laid out in a Storyboard, then programmed to function. About 3/4 of the way down this form, the user will be greeted with a "Yes" or "No" option and a button for each. The trick is that each view needs to have its own UI elements (text fields, sliders and buttons) appear ONLY when one of the options is selected and only BELOW the "Yes" or "No" option (all the elements above it need to remain, stay in the same place and hold the information the user enters).
An example : If the user hits the "Yes" button, below it 3 lines of text followed by a UIButton and Text Field would appear. Underneath this, other navigation buttons which navigate to other ViewControllers would appear. However, if the user hits the "No" button , all of those items I mentioned a moment ago would need to disappear, and instead a different set of text fields, labels, buttons and background image would need to appear. The navigation buttons will also need to link to other ViewControllers, different from the buttons in the "Yes" option. At this point I suggested to the client that a Navigation controller rooted at the bottom of the screen would be a good idea, but they are vehemently opposed to this and instead want the navigation options to be "dynamic" (or change according to which option is pressed, "Yes" or "No").
I have thought to attempt this programatically by simply using each button to load in a different image, this works just fine. The hitch then becomes twofold;
1) When I attempt to load the other UI elements that I get no way to lay them out in a storyboard and thus they appear in sporadic locations and
2) All this needs to be contained within a scroll view, which ALSO needs to change its size depending on how much space is needed below the yes and no option. Naturally the "Yes" section is 3 times smaller than the "No" section.
So, any ideas on how to make all this happen? I should mention at this point that the client also does not wish to simply navigate to a different ViewController, they very much want all this to occur on the same screen. I wish I had some code to share but we are still in the "design" aspect of this project and as such, very little code has been written. Any advice will be much appreciated as I've never been greeted with this type of build request before.
Create a UINavigationController object and set your view(say yourViewController) where your Yes and No buttons exist as a root view controller as below
UINavigationController *navController = [[UINavigationController alloc] initWithRootViewController:yourViewController];
Now when user press YES/NO button on yourViewController view than you can programmatically create all controls text field and buttons and set frame according to your view. like
UITextField *txtField = [[UITextField alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(enter frame accordinglly)];
[self.view addSubview:txtField];
same you can add more controls like buttons or any other controls.
after that when user press any the button(on which you want another view to display) you can push other view in the navController as below
[navController pushViewController:otherViewController animated:YES];
you need to keep track of navController in your yourViewController
when you want to go back just pop view from navController
[navController popViewControllerAnimated:YES];
PS: please be watchful for memory deallocation as well.
Has anyone ever had experience embedding a field editor (for a NSTextField) inside a scroll view? I'm trying to make the NSTextField scrollable while editing.
Things I've tried:
Dynamically embed it when the custom field editor's -becomeFirstResponder gets called. This semi works; the problem is that when the NSTextField gets resized during editing the custom field editor no longer gets resized with it (and I need this - making an accordion
style application)
Create a "masquerading" field editor out of a NSScrollView, and using NSInvocation forward the methods to the actual surrogate field editor. This is the method I really hope would work; I've implemented all the methods as listed here; but I get an EXC_BAD_ACCESS whenever the field editor is actually loaded (e.g. when I call [customTextField selectText:nil]). I can't seem to pry any information out of the debugger even with Zombies enabled, and looking at the logs of NSObjCMessageLoggingEnabled yields nothing either. It seems like these guys got it working but that was seven years ago.
The last resort would be to drop NSTextFields completely and use NSTextViews (or instead of relying on the field editor mechanism, write one myself), but since I have many rows of data of which only one will be edited at a time, I don't want to instantiate a NSTextView for every single one of them... but then, perhaps it won't be so bad.
I ended up using option 1, and getting it to work without much difficulty. Option 2 was a complete dead end because EXC_BAD_ACCESS popped up everywhere I went.
My custom field editor now keeps a reference to a (custom) scroll view to embed itself in (vvScrollView), and inserts it into the view hierarchy. My code inside my custom field editor (NSTextView) for embedding it inside a scroll view, which is called as soon as the field editor becomes first responder and is automatically inserted into the view hierarchy:
- (void)embedSelfInScrollView {
NSView *realSuperview = [[self superview] superview];
// [self superview] is some kind of private NSClipView class
if ([realSuperview isKindOfClass:[NSTextField class]]) { // the expected behavior: this may change? TODO make less prone to chance
[realSuperview addSubview:[self vvScrollView]]; // insert into view
[[self vvScrollView] setFrameSize:[realSuperview frame].size]; // se the initial size equivalent to control size so it can autoresize the same way
// add the scrollview into the view hierarchy
[[self vvScrollView] setDocumentView:self]; // removes self from previous superview
}
}
The initial problem I had was that I was trying to insert the scrollview into the superview immediately above the field editor's (the private class of NSClipView) which broke almost every automatic sizing option (because I want to be able to resize the NSTextField while editing). Going a step further and bypassing the private class seems to work, but almost seems arbitrary.