Maybe it is a dumb question but I would like to know when we have to or when it is recommanded to create new class. This is not really clear in my mind. For now, I've only one class per Controller and that's it... All my code is in this class.
I think it could be better...
Regards
If you're following the MVC pattern, for the most part your classes should be separated into one of those categories:
Controllers: UIKit/NS view controllers, which are responsible for presenting views and receiving messages from interactive elements on those views.
Views: If the view presented by one of your controllers requires a lot of custom logic in order to present itself, it might be a better idea to separate it into its own class. In essence, this is done when creating views using Interface Builder (.xib files).
Models: Objects that encapsulate logic in your application.
For example, if you are building an RSS viewer according to this design pattern, you'd likely make the following classes:
Models representing an individual RSS item, as well as one that represents an RSS feed. If you roll your own RSS feed parser, you would want to isolate the logic required to fetch entries within another class.
Controllers to handle displaying the feed and individual views. Controllers should only be concerned with presenting data. In the case of an RSS viewer on iOS, you would likely use a UINavigationController with a root view controller of the UITableViewController class. Tapping on a table cell pushes another UIViewController responsible for displaying an individual RSS item.
While the UITableController has a default view to display a list of items, the individual item likely needs custom logic to be displayed well. You might want to create a view class or .xib to present these. The UIViewController is responsible for populating data on the view (setting values on IBOutlets on the .xib, etc).
As a general guideline, you should try to adhere to the single responsibility principle--every class should have a single responsibility, and it can perform its tasks more or less autonomously.
In this vein, controllers are responsible for handling the display of a single kind of view and for delegating messages from that view. Views are responsible for displaying data. Models are responsible for the singular purpose they were created for--an RSS item for mapping data from an RSS feed to an object, an RSS feed object for managing a group of RSS items (adding, removing, possibly fetching more via an NSURLRequest).
Note: Your question is a bit vague according to Stack Overflow guidelines, so that may be why it is being down-voted. Consider adding a specific example or description of the dilemma you're facing.
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I'm a little confused about input processing in regards to Apple's MVC pattern. According to Apple, your objects should be divided into model objects (which handle the data), view objects (which display stuff), and controllers (which bind the two and also process events and input). However, many of Apple's native UIKit views — UIScrollView, UIControl objects, etc. — do all the input processing themselves, possibly letting their controllers know about it via delegates and data sources. This really confuses me. In my mind, the sturdiness of the MVC triad depends on both the model and view being fairly dumb (and thus easily swappable). When all the OS-level event complexity is centralized in the controller, you have a very nice separation of concerns. On the other hand, adding input processing to the view seems to turn it into a sort of controller of its own.
Am I missing something here? What's the correct way to think about this?
User Input is part of the View in the MVC pattern. They directly interact with the user and provide their data, either on request or through delegation, to a Controller, which might then use that input to affect changes to the Model.
"Dumb" and "easily swappable" are not necessarily the same thing.
Buttons contain a lot of functionality that we don't want to rewrite in every single controller: tinting of the image to indicate highlighting, allowing for cancellation if the tap strays a certain distance before touch-up, etc. Scroll views contain a lot of physics.
In other words, "which display stuff" is a mischaracterisation of view objects. UIView -- the base class -- just provides event data, but subclasses provide higher-level data such as "the button was tapped" or "the scroll view decelerated to a stop".
One thing to think about is your perspective.
When most of us code, our Model is a data object (maybe backed by files or databases, etc), our View is a UIView (possibly setup/configured in Interface Builder) and our Controller is the UIViewController.
What if you weren't coding an app though? What if your world was a UITableView? You can still have a basic MVC separation. Your Model is represented by the UITableViewDataSource protocol, your View still a UIView with it's setups and configurations and your Controller is the UITableViewDelegate protocol. All the pieces there and even separated, the separation is just different than when using a UIViewController. You can see a practical example of the separation a data change. When you the data in the data source protocol nothing happens. You have to call a reloadData method on Controller bit for the table to realize data was changed.
The smaller the item, the harder it will be to see the MVC pattern. A "button" would be a lot harder to use if it was broken into 3 different objects, but you can use MVC patterning inside a single object to create well encapsulated. A UIButton has it's Model in the form of a both public and private properties, a View (UIView still) and a Controller which is bunch of code that accepts events and makes modifications to the View and/or Model as appropriate.
I have a view controller placeViewController which pulls in a bunch of Place objects, and from these loads and populates a matching bunch of PlaceView objects which are then displayed as subviews to its main view.
I need to update these views periodically which requires information from the model and other places to be pushed into the views
How should I properly structure this?
Keep an array of Place objects and give the model a PlaceView property to store pointers to the views
Keep an array of PlaceView objects and give the view a Place property to store pointers to the places
Keep both arrays and use a lot of indexOfObject objectAtIndex to jump between them
Some other way??
I need to update these views periodically which requires information
from the model and other places to be pushed into the views
You should really focus on an ObserverPattern. Yours views register to "notifications", and when changes are made, your registered views are notified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern
You still can use NSNotificationCenter, but it will not futfill your needs since you need yours views make update per Place object (paired like a dictionary). So i recommend you to implement your own.
It will loose coupled because your controller will just only make glue between the observer and your views, and all the "logic" will be handled by the observer.
Well basvk got the answer in his comment but hasn't posted an actual answer for me to mark correct.
So here it is: "I would create a NSMutableArray with PlaceView objects. And the PlaceView class holds a #property Place *place"
I'm currently thinking of project, which is basically interpreting data from many abstract data sources.
So the communication within application is like this
[UI] <-> [Controller / Delegate] <-> [Subclass of Abstract Data Source]
which is basically the MVC pattern. What is my problem, that each [Subclass of Abstract Data Source] can use only limited amount of [UI], so the flow is basically this:
Create instance of Data Source (DS)
Get list of possible UI's from DS
Create UI chooser and instantiate preset UI
Let DS modify UI
Fill UI from DS by predefined handler method
Example UI's are NSTableView, NSOutlineView, NSCollectionView, etc.
So I basically need to change column names, order, style of controls, ... without possibility of having unique NSWindow designed for each Data Source
Now the question:
If I need dynamic UI creation and custom data handling logic (no bindings to Core Data, or so), should I (and is it even possible to) use InterfaceBuilder or should I implement all view logic programatically?
Use whichever you favor. Any variations/dynamic areas can be represented/handled by the controllers. In a way, that means that I recommend moving the dynamic portions to code to controllers -- but you can still use XIBs for common high level design, if you choose.
Therefore, when a view is not suitable for a singular data representation and is used for multiple, the implementation/variations can be moved to the controller domain. When an implementation/definition applies to all, then you can define that in the XIB or in the program -- wherever you prefer to put it. In that case, you can use XIBs (or code) for invariant (skeletal) views.
In MVC the View shouldn't hold it's data. However I know in Objective-c you do: [textField setString:#"hello"];, that string is then retained by the text field. The same applies for the textField's font and text colour, etc.
However a UITableView uses a datasource to ask a controller for it's data, it's then up to the controller to reload the table view. But it also stores some data itself, like background colour.
I can understand a reason as to why a UITextView doesn't use a data source the code would become much more lengthy, if every property had to be a method. But why use a data source in some cases and not others, why not just set an array of UITableViewCells (I know that this means cells could not be reused and so it would use more memory, but what other design reason is there), for the UITableView to display?
And when creating you own objects how do you know when to just store a small amount of generic data (e.g. the string a textview displays can only be a string, but any the string itself can be anything)in a view, or use a datasource?
MVC is a pattern, not an edict. Let the view do the work. Some coupling is just going to happen. Follow the guidelines of the pattern, and bend it to the style and desires of your developers and organization.
I'm not familiar with objective-c's mvc framework, but I think I understand the question.
Basically, you don't want the view doing anything with the datasource backend, that is, anything having to do with the plumbing of accessing the DB.
But its ok for the view to have access and use the data itself. That is the M part of MVC. The model gets passed around. The view knows how to display it. The controller knows how to do the business logic to it (including interacting with backend systems like the data access layer).
In the case of data grid, it has to hit the backend to get the data, so it has to rely on the controller.
Ideally, the view knows only about display related information (like the background color). The whole idea being separation of concerns. You want the view to handle just its part of things, like-wise the controller. Then you can modify them independently of each-other.
As for the specifics of the datasource (versus an array), grids tend to be complex. Maybe that is handling paging or other niceties. In this case, I don't think its so much the separation of layers (since an array could just as easily be the model), but handling more functionality.
I'm not sure what you mean re 'storing' small amounts of data in the view. The view should tend to deal with 'view stuff'.
I'm working on an app that (among other things) uses UIImagePicker to grab an image from the device once the user has selected the SourceType by tapping the appropriate button. Different sections of the app will need to use this functionality, as well as the variable holding the image information once selected. When I first started the project I had all of my code to do this in a single class named ViewController. I'm now working on moving the individual sections of the app into their own classes, but I'd like to be able to have them all use the UIImagePicker functionality from a central location.
Along with the necessary UIImagePickerController methods and protocols, I have a method that presents a view with buttons for each available SourceType. Each of these buttons then send a message to methods to show the appropriate picker (or the camera). Once an image is selected, it is applied to a variable for use by the different sections.
I wanted to get suggestions on the best way to approach this before I went to deep down the wrong rabbit hole.
Thanks!
If a lot of your classes use this functionality, you can create a superclass (itself being a subclass of UIViewController).
This class will expose some method to launch the process you described, and some other to gather the information collected.
If you don't want to use inheritance, or you already to with another class, you can also create a separate class responsible for this process.
This class, which is not necessary a UIViewController, has to be instantiated and then called the same way the superclass described above.