Short story:
The NSArrayController's selection is being reset whenever setContent is issued. I am wondering if there is a way to turn this off.
Of course, this would be the only acceptable behaviour if I would let NSArrayController use its internal selectionIndexes, because then it wouldn't be able to keep track of both. However, the selectionIndexes are rewired as well, and this part goes off without a hitch. It still feels the need to reset the selection, though.
Update: Ugly hack solution
I've moved this to an answer. I would be pleased to see another more insightful answer though.
Long story:
I have a Cocoa Document-based Application with an inspector panel that is shared between documents (modelled after the TextEdit source code that ships with xcode). Inside the Document class I have an NSMutableArray and an NSMutableIndexSet that are linked up with bindings to an NSArrayController.
The inspector panel is in a separate nib file, and I have two identical NSArrayControllers, one from the main document window, and one from the inspector panel, so that both can interact with the document. This is why I do a manual binding to the selectionIndexes, so that I don't get two separate selections with the two separate NSArrayControllers.
The inspector panel keeps track of which document is being inspected by a:
Document *inspectedDocument;
which is updated whenever the document is switched, or no document has focus at all. An NSObjectController is linked up to inspectedDocument, and the NSArrayController I mentioned before is linked up to that controller.
Now, my problem is that when the inspector panel is in place, and the inspectedDocument is changed, the selection indexes are reset. The problem goes away if I don't use the inspector panel, so I assume it is its NSArrayController that is issuing this reset. I don't have any controls that bind to the selection and could change it (such as a table view).
In the inspector panel's NSArrayController, if I have "Avoid Empty Selection" ticked, the selection resets to the first object, otherwise it resets to no selection, so it is definitely a legitimate resetting of the selection. Actually, I don't even want the inspector panel to ever be able to change the selection, so ideally I would like to establish a read-only binding for that NSArrayController's selection indexes.
I still don't understand why it happens, or if it can be turned off, but the solution I am using is very simple, I just save the selection before I rewire the NSArrayController, and then restore it right after.
This is called when the inspectedDocument is changed and the selection is reset:
NSIndexSet *indexSet = nil;
if (inspectedDocument != doc) {
indexSet = [doc.selectedIndexes copy]; // Backup selection
}
[self setValue:doc forKey:#"inspectedDocument"]; // Selection is reset here
if (indexSet) {
// The following function basically does doc.selectedIndexes = indexSet;
[inspectedDocument selectObjectsAtIndices:indexSet]; // Restore selection
[indexSet release];
}
Related
I've a hard time getting my Cocoa application to work as expected. It consists of a toolbar in the main.nib and a custom view in a details.nib file. Now I want the user to select an entry in a NSPopupButton in the toolbar and the content of the custom view should be changed accordingly.
To achive this I've added an ArrayController to my main.nib, showing the following configuration:
Furthermore the Managed Object Context is bound to the Model Key Path delegate.managedObjectContext (it is no document based application).
With this configuration the NSPopupButton works just fine and if I add a Label to the toolbar (also in the main.nib) and bind it's value to the selection (Controller Key), name (Key Value Path) the content is refreshed whenever I change the selection.
The Bindings of the NSPopupButton look like shown in the following screenshot:
So in my details.nib I tried the following to achieve the same effect. I've added an ArrayController, whichs Managed Object Context is also bound to the Model Key Path delegate.managedObjectContext. Also the configuration is exactly the same as shown in the above pictures. I've then added a label and bound it's value to the selection (Controller Key), name (Key Value Path) of this ArrayController.
The problem is that the Label only displays the the initial selection after the application did launched correctly. Afterwards, when I change the selection of my NSPopupButton, the label does not change accordingly.
What are my options to get the ArrayController working accross multiple NIB files?
BTW: I've tried to follow this blog post to get it working but it seems I'm missing something here.
Update:
If I replace the Label in the details.nib by a NSTextField and change the text of it, the changes are reflected in the related NSPopupButton entry. So I guess I made something right, but the main problem remains: I can only edit the entry which was loaded during application startup. Switching to another NSPopupButton entry does not change the text in the NSTextField.
Update 2:
I've created a small sample project with exactly the same configuration and uploaded it on GitHub. So feel free to check it out or create a pull request with a solution approach.
It seems you're missing the fact that, when you create the second array controller on the Details.xib it has no relation to the array controller on the MainMenu.xib. They are two separate instances.
When you change the selection on the PopUp the only array controller affected is the one on MainMenu.xib.
You have several options here:
When you create your DetailViewController pass a reference to the array controller on the Controller and bind to that (don't create a new one on the details.xib)
Just use simple KVO to observe the selection on Controller, and programatically change your label value.
Just use simple KVO to observe the selection on Controller and update the array controller on the DetailsViewController to keep them in sync.
your solution here...
As long as you understand what's going on I'm sure you'll find the best solution to your original problem.
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
I have a static NSTextField that overlays a large error message in my OS X app. I'm trying to get it to allow the user to click controls beneath it.
In IB I've unchecked "enabled" and I've checked "Refuses First Responder"
I've also done it in code because that wasn't working:
[largeErrorText setEnabled:NO];
[largeErrorText setRefusesFirstResponder:YES];
Still, it is getting in the way of interacting with the objects below it. Any ideas what else it might be?
The only way I have found to make an object transparent to the click is to subclass that object (in your case the NSTextField) and override the hitTest method returning nil. This way that NSTextField will not respond to the click so the NSView below will respond to the click.
- (NSView*)hitTest:(NSPoint)aPoint
{
return nil;
}
I assume you are describing a scenario like the following image shows:
The inner red rectangle is the frame outline of the NSTextField label, and you're saying that even though you've disabled the text field and set refuses first responder, your clicks do not go through to the NSButton?
This design scenario describes a condition called "Overlapping sibling views". I would generally try to avoid this if at all possible. If you can't, you can get the desired behavior by making sure that the NSTextField label is "behind" all of the other UI objects that you want to be able to interact with. You can do that by selecting the label and choosing Editor > Arrange > Send to Back. That will assure that the button is in front of the text field so that it can properly intercept mouse events.
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.
I've got an application here that needs to read in a bunch of data from an external file and display it as a NSPopUpButton in a Cocoa user interface. The catch here is that the data that is being read in needs to have a flag that states if it is considered "hidden" or not.
If the data is hidden, it needs to be added to the NSPopUpButton as an NSMenuItem, but the hidden flag needs to be set to YES so it does not normally appear in the NSPopUpButton menu. If the user holds down a "magic key" on their keyboard (usually ALT, in this case) then those hidden objects need to be unhidden. If the user lets go of the ALT key, then they need to be automatically re-hidden, except for the one that may have been selected -- which would become hidden if another NSMenuItem were chosen.
I'm kind of having a heck of a time figuring this out, actually.
I was wondering if there is a straight forward way of doing this using NSArrayController and an NSPopUpButton, but thus far I have not been able to find anything resembling a solution -- not when it comes to managing the hidden property of the NSMenuItem objects.
Does anyone know how this can be achieved using Cocoa Bindings?
You can wire the popup to an array controller and alter the filter predicate. From an MVC design standpoint, you wouldn't use an attribute like "hidden", which is a view characteristic, but maybe "advanced". Normally, set a filter predicate on your array controller to "advanced = no". Then when the user holds your preferred modifier, remove the predicate. The popup will update automatically. The array controller should be bound to an array property on another object (in your data model). The popup should be bound to arrangedObjects on the array controller.