I previously had a single-column collection view. Each element corresponded to
a file. If you hit space while an element was selected, you'd get the
quicklook. If you double-clicked, you'd open the file. So that looked like this:
Element
Element
Element
This was implemented as an NSCollectionView because each element had multiple
bits of information to display in its view.
New feature: each element can now correspond to one or more files. The desired
appearance expands the single column into what looks like two columns, like
this:
-----
Element File 1
-----
Element File 1
File 2
-----
Element File 1
File 2
File 3
File 4
File 5
It would be nice if each NSCollectionItemView could be a different height, to
accommodate all the files, but NSCollectionView doesn't support this.
My first attempt was to embed an NSTableView in the righthand side of each
NSCollectionItemView, and do a little
observeValueForKeyPath:ofObject:change:context hackery to notice when the
backing NSArrayController changed and attach/reattach the dataSources of the
NSTableViews. (At times, the NSArrayController will get a different backing
array.) That didn't work because the tables wouldn't update until the user
clicked somewhere in the user interface.
I thought of using an NSTextView-with-scrollbar and having each filename be on
a new line, but starting down that path makes it seem like a lot of work, as
would be some sort of NSMatrix or a custom view.
A user looking at the display will be interested in seeing the filenames for
multiple elements, so a master/detail interface would be unsatisfactory.
Anyone have any suggestions for the right element-container and
file-within-element-container classes to use?
-----
Brian Marick, Artisanal Labrador
Contract programming in Ruby and Clojure
Author of /Ring/ (forthcoming; sample: http://exampler.com/tmp/ring.pdf)
www.exampler.com, www.exampler.com/blog, www.twitter.com/marick
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