Getting mouse events from a View in the Parent ViewController - objective-c

I need to understanding how to get the mouse events from a View in the Parent view Controller.
Lets say I have a view controller, and among many things It manages an NSMutableArray of points. I can initialize the array and pass it to the view class where it will draw to the
rect of the view.
If I have configured some typical mouse events in the view, I could add points in the view
and have them also draw.
What I don't understand is how to send that information back to the parent view controller so it can add the point to the point array.
I'm not sure if I am supposed to some how overload the methods(they do not respond in a controller) or if I can set up a delegate(Which I don't know exactly how to do for this).
Advice is greatly appreciated, and an example would be great too.
FYI this was a simple example of a more complex problem I need to solve, but the solution would still apply.
Thanks

As a newbie to Cocoa, Using custom delegate is still foreign to me, but that is the solution. Good old object message passing.
1 Create a delegate in your view class --> id mouseDelagate.
2 Create a simple protocol class with at least one method.
3 in the actual mouse event method in the view class. call the protocol method with
the delegate [mouseDelegate mouseDidMove: point ].(however you defined the method).
4 set the delegate in the view controller class in the awakeFromNib file([viewClass setMouseDelegate: self]);
5 implement the protocol method;
-(void)MouseDidMove{
NSLog(#"moving");
}
6 remember to import the protocol in both classes

Related

Delegation coding style?

I have just a minor question about coding style.
I have a subclass of UIViewController which is a delegate to an MKMapView object. Naturally, I have an ivar in my view controller which points to said MKMapView. When I'm writing one of the callback methods mapView:didUpdateUserLocation:, is it smarter to send messages to the passed-in reference of the map view or to the ivar reference of the map view?
I'm aware these are essentially the same thing. I use the ivar reference of the map view object. What are the pros and cons of both styles?
Since you know that both MKMapView objects are one and the same thing, it doesn't matter in this particular case. The reason for the convention requiring the first delegate parameter to be the calling object is to handle the situation when a class is a delegate to more than one object. E.g. if you show two different UIAlertView's in your view controller, and the view controller is a delegate to both (a common scenario), then you want to know in the delegate methods which alert view you're dealing with.

Objective-C: Refactoring code - how do I get a pointer to a view instance?

I am not very experienced with OOP so I wanted to share what I am currently doing and ask for some advice about how I should go about a couple of things.
I am currently working on a simple game that uses a 2d grid. Here is a quick overview of my class structure:
'GameBoard'- has an array of the possible cell states for the game, and methods that implement the rules.
'GameView' - has the superclass NSView, and is placed in my window as a custom view. This class is intended to read from the game board and draw the contents of the array by mapping the stares to an enumeration of images in its drawRect: method.
'GameController' - this is an intermediate class intended to initialise the game board and view, and handle the various UI controls. This class has instance variables of the 'GameBoard' and 'GameView' type.
Originally, I was doing nearly everything in the View class, and had it working fine but it started to get hard really to follow, which was my main reason for wanting to spread my code over a new class.
I have created a method in 'GameController' that initialises a new game, with some user defined parameters (removed in the snippet to save space).
-(IBACTION)initialiseGame:(id)sender {
gameBoard = [[GameBoard alloc] init...];
gameView = [[GameView alloc] init...];
}
What I want to do here is pass the game view a pointer to the game board instance so that I can read it's array to draw the current state of the game, something like:
-(void)initWithGameBoard:(GameBoard*)gameBoard;
Is this the right way of going about that, or should I be doing this in a different way?
My next problem with moving to the controller class is that I cannot seem to find out how to do is get a pointer to the instance of GameView that I have placed on the window in IB? Would it be better to not place the view on the window in interface builder, and instead place it on the window programatically in the initialiseGame function? If so how would I go about doing that?
I guess one other question would be, should I just scrap this idea and stick to doing everything in the GameDraw class?
Thank you very much for taking your time to read this, this is probably a very simple question to any experienced object-oriented programmer, but I cannot seem to find the answers specifically anywhere.
There's more than one way to do make this work, but here's how I would do it:
Instantiate the view once in IB. Don't invoke alloc/init yourself.
In your view controller, make an outlet for your view and connect it in Interface Builder. That's how your controller will get access to it. Your view controller will need to be the file owner — probably it already is.
Design the view to be reusable. Give it a -setGameBoard: method for the controller to invoke. Make sure the view can draw something blank when it doesn't have a game board.
Write -initializeGame: like this:
-(IBAction) initialiseGame:(id) sender {
gameBoard = [[GameBoard alloc] init...];
[gameView setGameBoard:gameBoard];
}

IOS: is it possible to bind one story board view controller to several different classes?

I know it's possible to attach a custom view controller class to several different view controllers on a storyboard, but can it be done in the other direction; that is, depending on the situation, I want to bind different custom classes to a single view controller on the storyboard that will be instantiated using:
[self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:]
background: I used to have several view controllers on my storyboard that are almost identical. In fact, the custom classes that they each bind to are very similar as well. In an effort to clean this up, I refactored my custom classes into one base class and several subclasses. I then removed all the similar view controllers from the storyboard leaving only one which I've bounded to my base class. I then call:
MySubclass* mySubclass = [self.storyboard instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier:#"StoryboardControllerBoundToBaseClass"];
Unfortunately, my subclass code is being ignored and only the base class code is ever run. Does anyone know how I can make it work without duplicating view controllers on the storyboard and binding each one to a different subclass?
It's not possible. Just because you say MySubclass *object = something doesn't magically convert object into a MySubclass object. It's stored in the storyboard with whatever class was assigned at storyboard compile time.
Rather than using subclassing, I figure I can reuse a view controller on the storyboard by using a delegate/proxy model. More specifically, I can bind the storyboard's view controller to a custom class that delegates all of its methods/events to others classes to handle. This isn't as elegant as subclassing but at least I can keep my storyboard leaner, not having to keep several copies of pretty much the same view controller. Plus, I won't need to duplicate future changes to every copy of these controllers to boot.
As guylegend writes. Apple doesn't support the way to do that. There are many workarounds e.g. with delegates but I finally found the answer and answered in another topic. Hope it helps!
https://stackoverflow.com/a/32103618/1943053

iOS model view controller design with XML

I am making a tabbed bar application that has a section for Quizzes (which are written in XML). I am trying to conform to the MVC paradigm so I created a parser-delegate class, and a class for a quiz object which contains an array of questions and an array of their associated answers. My problem is that my parsing method has no way of sending it's quiz objects back to the view controller. Do I need to set up a delegate for the view controller to communicate with the Parser? Or should I just set the view controller to be the delegate for the parser and not have a separate class for the parser delegate.
Note: I am using NSXMLParser..
Any input as to the best way to do this is much appreciated.
Is your problem that you UIViewController is already created when then parsing finishes, I would usually use NSNotifications for this. And then the UIViewController can wait for the NSNotification or your app delegate can and then pass it onto your ViewController. Alternatively you can use a delegate callback or a callback blocks if you are supporting iOS4+. Hope this answers your questions.

Registering all view controllers for NSNotifications

I have a custom graphic that is to be displayed to a user when an event occurs. The graphic needs to be displayed on whichever viewController is currently being displayed to the user.
The way i have programmed it so far is by adding to ALL viewcontrtollers:
1) the .h file for the custom graphic class
2) an observer for the NSNotification event that is raised
3) the method which actually draws the graphic.
This doesnt feel like a very efficient way of doing things and i was wondering if anyone has a better way of doing things?
To me it sounds like you've done it in a fairly sane way. The only other way I can think is to just add the graphic to the window which would then overlay on the current view controller and you'd only need to have one object listening for the notification. You could use the app delegate for instance. But then you would have to worry about rotation of the screen yourself when adding the graphic over the top.
What you are doing is correct .. The only thing you can improve is to mauve the drawing graphics part to the custom graphic class.. (if you are not already doing so...
just Make a UIViewController variable as a member variable to the graphics class..and then set it up to the current view displaying..after you receive the notifications..and the class will itself draw the code based on the ViewController you set it up to
The reason it doesn't feel efficient is that you're duplicating a lot of code. That's more work at the outset, and it creates a maintenance headache. You should be taking advantage of the inheritance that's built into object oriented languages, including Objective-C.
If you want all your view controllers to share some behavior, then implement that behavior in a common superclass. Derive all your other view controllers from that superclass, and they'll all automatically get the desired behavior. Your superclass's initializer can take care of registering the view controller for the notification(s) that you care about, and -dealloc can unregister it. This way, you don't have to clutter up each view controller with the same repeated code, and if you want to change the code you only have to do it in one place.