NSUserDefaultsController with defaults for another app
-
Greetings Cocoa-devs!
My app ships as a System Preferences preference pane that contains a
faceless agent app inside it's bundle. The agent app provides all of
the functionality for my app. The prefpane stores preferences in the
plist file for my app (rather than that for the host System
Preferences app). I've been able to make this work by sending
persistentDomainForName: to the shared instance of NSUserDefaults.
Now i'm trying to use bindings in order to simplify displaying a
collection of dictionaries in an NSTable. I can see my preference
data via an NSUserDefaultsController if i initialize it like this
where defaultsController is actually an instance of NSObjectController:
NSUserDefaults *defaultsInstance = [NSUserDefaults
standardUserDefaults];
[defaultsInstance addSuiteNamed:DOMAIN];
NSUserDefaultsController *controller = [[NSUserDefaultsController
alloc] initWithDefaults: defaultsInstance initialValues: nil];
[defaultsController setContent:controller];
My NSTable shows the correct data, but when i update the information
it is persisted back to the com.apple.systempreferences.plist file,
and not the plist file for my app. Craig Hockenberry posted a similar
question about 3.5 years ago (http://tinyurl.com/5upqnp) without
receiving many responses and google has so far turned up very little.
Is there a way for me to bind my preferences to my view that's hosted
in another app (in this case System Preferences?).
Thank you so much,
Keith Alperin -
On Aug 12, 2008, at 11:11 PM, Keith Alperin wrote:
> My app ships as a System Preferences preference pane that contains a
> faceless agent app inside it's bundle. The agent app provides all
> of the functionality for my app. The prefpane stores preferences in
> the plist file for my app (rather than that for the host System
> Preferences app). I've been able to make this work by sending
> persistentDomainForName: to the shared instance of NSUserDefaults.
>
> Now i'm trying to use bindings in order to simplify displaying a
> collection of dictionaries in an NSTable. I can see my preference
> data via an NSUserDefaultsController if i initialize it like this
> where defaultsController is actually an instance of
> NSObjectController:
>
> NSUserDefaults *defaultsInstance = [NSUserDefaults
> standardUserDefaults];
> [defaultsInstance addSuiteNamed:DOMAIN];
> NSUserDefaultsController *controller = [[NSUserDefaultsController
> alloc] initWithDefaults: defaultsInstance initialValues: nil];
> [defaultsController setContent:controller];
>
> My NSTable shows the correct data, but when i update the information
> it is persisted back to the com.apple.systempreferences.plist file,
> and not the plist file for my app. Craig Hockenberry posted a
> similar question about 3.5 years ago (http://tinyurl.com/5upqnp)
> without receiving many responses and google has so far turned up
> very little.
>
> Is there a way for me to bind my preferences to my view that's
> hosted in another app (in this case System Preferences?).
This page of the preference pane documentation says that
NSUserDefaults isn't useful to preference panes, precisely because of
the issues you're seeing:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/Preferen
cePanes/Concepts/Managing.html#/
/apple_ref/doc/uid/20000703-BABHJCCA
Presumably, that extends to NSUserDefaultsController, too.
It shouldn't be too hard, though, to create a model object of your own
which exposes your preferences as its properties. It would use the
CFPreferences API as its backing store. There would be more work
required to support all of the features of NSUserDefaultsController,
though -- things like the deferred application of changes, reverting,
restoring factory settings, etc.
Cheers,
Ken
