Kyle, 

Thanks (I think). I asked the question as simply as I could without convoluting 
it with quite a bit of complexity, which would probably lead more to 
theoretical discussion rather than the specific issue. But since you want a 
more involved description of the problem, I've developed a processing framework 
that facilitates workflow by sequentially processing workflow plugins. All 
plugins are agnostic of one another, and the workflow framework is agnostic to 
the function of the plugins. This workflow framework dynamically becomes 
whatever app I want it to be, just by changing the plugin stack that the 
workflow framework processes. 

There are some interesting design questions that arise about responsibility of 
processing, whether the workflow manager merely provides certain state 
information to a plugin, and makes each plugin handle the condition, or whether 
the workflow manager imposes itself on the process. The particular 
manifestation that this question was addressing is if a plugin presented a 
modal alert which the user had not yet dismissed, when the workflow manager 
needed to present its own modal alert, what approaches existed to handle this. 

Very similar questions exist between OS and apps -- when does the OS merely 
provide info to an app (which passes responsibility for handling to the app) 
vs. when does the OS impose itself on the app and overrule its UI and 
processing.  

That's the idea...pretty oversimplified here. But that is what was behind the 
question. If an app could easily request a reference to any NSAlert that was 
currently being displayed, it might  suggest an alternative to handling it. 
Presently, each plugin has to handle dismissing its own potentially displayed 
alerts when the workflow manager decides it needs to display its own alerts, 
and the workflow manager effectively messages the plugins by virtue of pause 
and resume lifecycle methods on plugins. 

Thanks, 

Brad

Brad O'Hearne
Founder/Lead Developer
Big Hill Software LLC
http://www.bighillsoftware.com

On Dec 3, 2012, at 10:10 PM, Kyle Sluder <k...@ksluder.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 3, 2012, at 05:13 PM, Brad O'Hearne wrote:
>> Hello all, 
>> 
>> Is there a way to get a reference to the currently displayed modal
>> NSAlert, or to be able to globally determine if a modal alert is
>> presently showing in a Cocoa app, though you have no knowledge of where
>> in the app it originated from? 
> 
> If you need to know this, your architecture is almost certainly screwed
> up.
> 
> What are you actually trying to accomplish?
> 
> --Kyle Sluder


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