Re: re-making connections with a different controller
On Jun 10, 2009, at 07:40, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: Can I make connections programmatically? That might be easier for now. It's catch-22, I think. You have to find all the controls that need their target set, and identify which target to use for which control. Normally, the easiest way to do that would be to use IBOutlets, but you'd need hundreds of those, and then you'd have to drag a connection from each to the corresponding control. :) ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: re-making connections with a different controller
One other thing to keep things simple.. Take all common functionality and put it into a base view controller class. Then subclass from there for any new controls, functionality, setup, etc. Scott On Jun 10, 2009, at 7:40 AM, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: On 9 Jun 2009, at 22:44, Quincey Morris wrote: On Jun 9, 2009, at 19:50, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: If you must use a tab view, you could also approach it with a view xib and a view controller to define the common part of each tab. The view controller would act as an intermediary to pass the action methods on to the correct controller. (The details, and feasibility, of this approach might depend on exactly what class of controllers you're trying to use.) That sounds interesting but will involve a near complete overhaul. Are you sure? Well, yes and no. I'm writing the GUI for a real time audio program. The back end of that is written in C++ which I've written too. The Cocoa UI is getting quite complex now but is nearly finished so I'm a bit reluctant to tear it apart. It is my first real Cocoa project though so I can't assume I've got it all right first time. Moving the contents of the tabs to a different xib file (or is it xib files? are all the tabs identical in appearance?) is straightforward. Connecting the individual controls to the view controller (File's Owner) is straightforward. Writing intermediary action methods in your view controller subclass to pass the actions on the correct controller (held in an instance variable, or set as the representedObject) is straightforward. All my tabs are identical. The current purpose of my controller objects is to map the value from a control onto a nonlinear range. I display the nonlinear value in the UI for user feedback and then pass it to the C++ audio side. There are a number of controls within in each tab(s) which require a custom mapping and differ from controller to controller based on some user selection. Currently I deal with this by dynamically allocating/deallocating a kind of sub controller object of the required type at that time. The only real work happens in (say) your window controller's awakeFromNib method. In that method, you would create as many view controllers as there are distinct tabs, passing the correct action controller object as a parameter, and letting the view controller instantiate its nib. Then, for each view controller, replace the appropriate tab subview with the view controller's view. That doesn't require any design changes anywhere else in your application, AFAICT. It also has the advantage of making your life really easy if you ever have to add one more control to all of the tabs. I know I will be adding and changing things over the next few months so I think it will be worthwhile putting the time in to implement something like this. It isn't so much the tedium of manually connecting things together but the inevitability that a few connections will go astray at some point. I did try something with bindings but it quickly got out of hand for me. Can I make connections programmatically? That might be easier for now. Thanks, Stephen ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/scottandrew%40roadrunner.com This email sent to scottand...@roadrunner.com ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: re-making connections with a different controller
On 9 Jun 2009, at 22:44, Quincey Morris wrote: On Jun 9, 2009, at 19:50, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: If you must use a tab view, you could also approach it with a view xib and a view controller to define the common part of each tab. The view controller would act as an intermediary to pass the action methods on to the correct controller. (The details, and feasibility, of this approach might depend on exactly what class of controllers you're trying to use.) That sounds interesting but will involve a near complete overhaul. Are you sure? Well, yes and no. I'm writing the GUI for a real time audio program. The back end of that is written in C++ which I've written too. The Cocoa UI is getting quite complex now but is nearly finished so I'm a bit reluctant to tear it apart. It is my first real Cocoa project though so I can't assume I've got it all right first time. Moving the contents of the tabs to a different xib file (or is it xib files? are all the tabs identical in appearance?) is straightforward. Connecting the individual controls to the view controller (File's Owner) is straightforward. Writing intermediary action methods in your view controller subclass to pass the actions on the correct controller (held in an instance variable, or set as the representedObject) is straightforward. All my tabs are identical. The current purpose of my controller objects is to map the value from a control onto a nonlinear range. I display the nonlinear value in the UI for user feedback and then pass it to the C++ audio side. There are a number of controls within in each tab(s) which require a custom mapping and differ from controller to controller based on some user selection. Currently I deal with this by dynamically allocating/deallocating a kind of sub controller object of the required type at that time. The only real work happens in (say) your window controller's awakeFromNib method. In that method, you would create as many view controllers as there are distinct tabs, passing the correct action controller object as a parameter, and letting the view controller instantiate its nib. Then, for each view controller, replace the appropriate tab subview with the view controller's view. That doesn't require any design changes anywhere else in your application, AFAICT. It also has the advantage of making your life really easy if you ever have to add one more control to all of the tabs. I know I will be adding and changing things over the next few months so I think it will be worthwhile putting the time in to implement something like this. It isn't so much the tedium of manually connecting things together but the inevitability that a few connections will go astray at some point. I did try something with bindings but it quickly got out of hand for me. Can I make connections programmatically? That might be easier for now. Thanks, Stephen ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: re-making connections with a different controller
On Jun 9, 2009, at 19:50, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: If you must use a tab view, you could also approach it with a view xib and a view controller to define the common part of each tab. The view controller would act as an intermediary to pass the action methods on to the correct controller. (The details, and feasibility, of this approach might depend on exactly what class of controllers you're trying to use.) That sounds interesting but will involve a near complete overhaul. Are you sure? Moving the contents of the tabs to a different xib file (or is it xib files? are all the tabs identical in appearance?) is straightforward. Connecting the individual controls to the view controller (File's Owner) is straightforward. Writing intermediary action methods in your view controller subclass to pass the actions on the correct controller (held in an instance variable, or set as the representedObject) is straightforward. The only real work happens in (say) your window controller's awakeFromNib method. In that method, you would create as many view controllers as there are distinct tabs, passing the correct action controller object as a parameter, and letting the view controller instantiate its nib. Then, for each view controller, replace the appropriate tab subview with the view controller's view. That doesn't require any design changes anywhere else in your application, AFAICT. It also has the advantage of making your life really easy if you ever have to add one more control to all of the tabs. ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: re-making connections with a different controller
On 10/06/2009, at 9:15 AM, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: Perhaps this illustrates an underlying fundamental problem with the structure of my app but I don't want to know about that right now :) Well, ok, maybe I do... I think you recognise that this is indeed problematic... ;-) If the controls are all the same, why not have one set of controls and one controller, and switch the connection from the controller to the data model instead? That sounds like a much more conventional and sane approach. Bindings or KVO can make that really easy to handle, with very little code required to "rewire" the controls to reflect the new data model object. --Graham ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: re-making connections with a different controller
On 9 Jun 2009, at 18:47, Quincey Morris wrote: In the absence of further information, it seems that a tab view is wrong approach here. If all the so-called tabs are identical in user interface terms (that is, the only difference is the data they retrieve from your data model), you'd probably do better with a single set of the controls and a segmented control to choose which set of data values to use. I simplified a little. I have a grid of 16 NSTabViews each of which have at least 4 tabs. I need to display all of this data simultaneously on one screen. If you must use a tab view, you could also approach it with a view xib and a view controller to define the common part of each tab. The view controller would act as an intermediary to pass the action methods on to the correct controller. (The details, and feasibility, of this approach might depend on exactly what class of controllers you're trying to use.) That sounds interesting but will involve a near complete overhaul. Wagner: the text editor approach sounds ideal for now. Thanks, Stephen ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: re-making connections with a different controller
On Jun 9, 2009, at 16:15, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: Imagine I have an NSTabView with 10 tabs that all contain the same collection of controls. The only difference is that each control's action/outlet is connected to a different controller object (of the same class type). Is it possible to select a whole tab of controls, copy them to the next tab and somehow change all the connections to and from Controller1 so that they now connect to Controller2,3,4,5,6 etc without having to do 300 CTRL drags. Perhaps this illustrates an underlying fundamental problem with the structure of my app but I don't want to know about that right now :) Well, ok, maybe I do... In the absence of further information, it seems that a tab view is wrong approach here. If all the so-called tabs are identical in user interface terms (that is, the only difference is the data they retrieve from your data model), you'd probably do better with a single set of the controls and a segmented control to choose which set of data values to use. If you must use a tab view, you could also approach it with a view xib and a view controller to define the common part of each tab. The view controller would act as an intermediary to pass the action methods on to the correct controller. (The details, and feasibility, of this approach might depend on exactly what class of controllers you're trying to use.) ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
Re: re-making connections with a different controller
Hi Stephen, one approach that I have successfully employed several times when having to do a substantial amount of dreadful and error-prone mechanical work on xib files, of the kind you're talking about, is to use a text-editor and do a search and replace on the contents of the xib file. This works because xib files are xml files. So, in your particular case, I'd set up ONE tab then copy all of its contents to all other 9 tabs, then save and close the xib file. Then I'd open the same xib file in a text editor (my favorite is BBEdit) and do a search/replace for the controller name. You can even do a grep search and replace so you won't have to do the same operation 9 times, but only once. If you haven't done this before, though, I strongly recommend that you keep a backup of your xib file prior to messing with it inside the text editor, because it's easy to muck things up and end up with a corrupted xib file. Good luck. Wagner On Jun 10, 2009, at 1:15 AM, Stephen Blinkhorn wrote: Hi all, Imagine I have an NSTabView with 10 tabs that all contain the same collection of controls. The only difference is that each control's action/outlet is connected to a different controller object (of the same class type). Is it possible to select a whole tab of controls, copy them to the next tab and somehow change all the connections to and from Controller1 so that they now connect to Controller2,3,4,5,6 etc without having to do 300 CTRL drags. Perhaps this illustrates an underlying fundamental problem with the structure of my app but I don't want to know about that right now :) Well, ok, maybe I do... Thanks, Stephen ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
re-making connections with a different controller
Hi all, Imagine I have an NSTabView with 10 tabs that all contain the same collection of controls. The only difference is that each control's action/outlet is connected to a different controller object (of the same class type). Is it possible to select a whole tab of controls, copy them to the next tab and somehow change all the connections to and from Controller1 so that they now connect to Controller2,3,4,5,6 etc without having to do 300 CTRL drags. Perhaps this illustrates an underlying fundamental problem with the structure of my app but I don't want to know about that right now :) Well, ok, maybe I do... Thanks, Stephen ___ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
