Just a concept question.
What would you prefer doing and why, should you need to insert into a view a subview, would you rather have a nib file to add it or would you programatically insert it?
I am talking about xcode 4.~ development using storyboards.
Regards, Guy.
That depends on your situation. If it's something very simple or something dynamic (variable number of buttons for example) then I would do it programmatically. If it's a complex but static view (something like a settings view) then I would try using IB.
I personally will do it programmatically if i need the view to be dynamic. But it can be done even with the view created in the xib file. I would prefer creating in xib if the the view needs no dynamism so that it would reduce my coding portion
Related
I am trying to switch an existing NSView with a new view loaded from nib file. I see there are two approaches to this
Remove my subview from super view and add the new subview to the super view.
[NSView]RemoveFromSuperView and
[NSView]AddSubView
Replace my existing subview with the new subview using this call
[NSView] ReplaceSubviewWith(NSView, NSView)
Are these both calls the same ? Is there any significant advantage or difference in using one over the other ?
If you are really swapping out one view for another use replaceSubview:with:; after all, that's the exact job it was designed for! It's useful if you want the replacement view to be in the same place as the old view, and it's probably optimized a bit more for the subview replacement use case (I doubt that makes a huge difference though).
I have a Mac app that needs to be based on multiple modules. That is, a single window with multiple views, and the default view with a menu. That menu should open one module on the default window and then if I select another module, the contents of the window should change with another view. Those views also have different states, so I made multiple views for each module.
In a nutshell, my app is a single AppDelegate.h/.m, a single xib file, with one NSWindow object and multiple NSView views. Those views have different states, so I load different other related NSViews.
To load a view, I use [window setContentView:viewNameView]; which I know that causes the old NSView to lose state, so I need to keep them all in memory for each module.
Is this the right approach?
Thank you!
You don't describe how and where you want the menu but a widely used method is to have a sourcelist on the left and the content on the right. You see this everywhere including Apples own apps.
If you create a sourcelist on the left of your window and place an NSBox on the right side.
Set up the sourcelist (NSOutlineView) to react to - outlineViewSelectionDidChange: which is an NSOutlineView delegate method.
Here you can check the identifier on the selected item in the menu and set the content view for the NSBox accordingly with - setContentView:
Here's a great introduction to using NSOutlineViews for anyone interested.
Edit: Depending on how many views you have it might be easier to have an NSTabView (in tabless mode) and just switch tabs in the - outlineViewSelectionDidChange: method. This is also widely used and the user won't see the difference.
You will want to look up NSWindowController for managing your window and xib, and NSViewController for managing views. The app delegate shouldn't do much (in fact you probably could remove the header file and merge it with .m).
Some references to look at:
https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-04-05-windows-and-window-controllers.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/samplecode/ViewController/Introduction/Intro.html
Yes that will work. What you may end up needing as well, is a custom Navigation Controller. Unfortunately Cocoa doesn't have an NSNavigationController, so you'll have to write something on your own. But basically yeah what you'll do is swap out the contentView with the next view you want to display-- and keep a stack of views you've navigated to so you can support going back (or you could use a dictionary to add transition keys to create strongly linked transitions)
Here's an good example somebody posted in a previous thread-- if you just search for Cocoa Mac Navigation Controller you should find some helpful results :)
Mac OS X Cocoa multiview application navigation
Another thing that you may want to keep in mind, which came up for me, is if your views are of different sizes. If they are, and you are using auto-layout, you will need to update the constraints to resize the window appropriately as views are swapped out
I have been using the storyboard to make an application and currently there are many segues and several components. This is causing a ton of lag when I try to do anything inside the storyboard. Is there a way to hide components inside the storyboard? thanks.
+1, For the potentially features to improve Xcode. Now, there is no way you can hide those views (Not that I know). But I would suggest you to,
Hide the debug areas you don't need.
Hide the document outline while working with segues.
Why?
I think in this way whenever you are making changes, system does not have to repaint those unwanted views and long document outline. Probably this will be less laggy(I don't think there is a word like this)!
Work around
Divide your segue into different meta segues and then you can call those segues from your main segue. In that way you don't have to put each connection on one file but you condense it!
And here we go the documentation for it! Now you can get the story board by different file and then initiate with the UIViewController easily. Then you can just use old ways to segue between different ViewControllers.
Apple Documentation for UIStoryboard
Demo App.
In order to achieve this, I have made a quick demo application which will help any future visitors.
https://github.com/Krutarth/LargeStoryboardManagement
Visually something like this,
You can split one huge storyboard into multiple small storyboards.
Select the view controllers that you want to move to a smaller storyboard, then
In the top menu, click Editor -> Refactor to Storyboard
Save the new storyboard with the desired name. XCode will auto generate all the required storyboard links from your large storyboard to this newly created small one.
I am trying to develop an application that has screen flow similar to oracle app. I have attached the images here. Can anyone please tell how this can be achieved ?
Thanks in advance.
What you are looking for is a custom Split View Controller. The screenshots you provided are of custom split view controllers. The UIKit has UISplitViewController but this must be a fullscreen view controller.
To make a custom split view controller there's the old way, by having a main view controller and making your two master and detail controllers, adding their view to the main view controllers view.
You need to forward on calls from viewWillAppear:, viewWillDisappear: etc from the main view controller to the two controllers that you manage.
As of iOS 5, you can do something similar with view controller containment, this has a few more bells and whistles, more interesting it handles rotation animations better and all the call forwarding to the children controllers that you had to do manually in the first solution.
Check out this link for more details on custom split view controllers:
http://www.mindtreatstudios.com/how-its-made/custom-uisplitviewcontroller-ios/
To answer your question directly: if you make a custom split view controller - yes you can add this as a detail view controller. But watch out, this isn't a UISplitViewController, so just be careful not to use that term so much.
Haven't really tested this, but doesn't this solve your problem?
Create a storyboard file
Drop in a SplitViewController
Delete the DetailViewController
Drop in another SplitViewController
Link the two together using CTRL-drag and select Detail
Set the size of the detail-splitviewcontroller to Detail
????
Profit!
Anyways, not sure if it really works, but give it a try. This is IOS5 though (I think, might try it out with IB).
It'll look something like this:
If you're going to have to write your own class, you might want to first look at https://github.com/mattgemmell/MGSplitViewController for inspiration.
I'm just getting into desktop Cocoa development (I have experience with iOS development). If this question seems basic, forgive me.
That being said, I'm dealing with a large program with lots of calculations and functionality to deal with. There are almost a dozen views, organized with an NSTabView. Rather than dumping everything into one monstrosity of a class and creating a XIB file that brings my system to its knees (Xcode apparently isn't that efficient…who knew? :P). I'd like for each tab to be its own NSViewController with accompanying XIB; as such, I'd like to load each tab's view from the corresponding XIB.
I'm thinking of this in terms of UITabBarController, but this doesn't seem to work (there isn't an NSTabViewController as far as I could find). I'm not sure how to do this (or even if it's possible—but I can't be the only one with this issue?), and I'd appreciate any assistance. Thanks!
Update: I tried assigning the controller's view to the tab's view, but quickly realized that wouldn't get me anywhere. Is it worth creating an NSTabViewController from scratch, or is there a solution out there?
Cocoa development on the desktop has some major differences compared to iOS development. One of them is the use of view controllers - they aren't strictly necessary - and when you use them you can just stick to a generic NSViewController regardless of what kind of view it contains. All of the methods you need to control the tab view are in the NSTabView class - not the controller.
Having said that, putting 12 views in to a tabview sounds like a painful way to interact with a program. Have you thought about a source-detail type setup (think itunes or mail with their sidebars - each entry in the sidebar corresponds to a different view)?
I've ditched the tab bar, and as per sosborn's suggestion, I have used a split view—or rather I've put a table view on the side, and a custom view taking up most of the screen. Then, in my AppDelegate, I have individual controllers as ivars (I need individual controllers because there are a lot of calculations involved, and I don't want to have a monster class handling them all). They'll be lazily loaded, and the view will be assigned to the current controller's view as necessary.