Re: designing beyond MV and (one) C

FROM : Uli Kusterer
DATE : Wed Jan 16 02:31:37 2008

On Jan 16, 2008, at 12:40 AM, Daniel Child wrote:
> I didn't think of subclassing from a "generic controller." I thought 
> that the controllers are the least rewritable code, and therefore 
> not generally subclassed. Now the model code for the different 
> parsers... they have enough in common, I think, to justify 
> subclassing.


Well, in practice it is often the case that a controller isn't very 
reusable, but that's not a hard and fast rule. If your particular case 
allows for a certain amount of genericness, it would be a shame to let 
that opportunity go to waste and write special code over and over 
again. The main advantage of OOP is that it makes it easier to reuse 
code because it helps you structure it in reusable packages. But OOP, 
MVC and all the rest of the alphabet soup is there to serve you, not 
the other way round :-)

>> The rest of the app would just talk to the subclass through the 
>> generic controller's interface. If there is only one window, one 
>> window controller would be enough. If you only have very, very 
>> simple windows, and you don't open several instances of the same 
>> window, you may even get away without a window controller and just 
>> hide and show the windows as needed.

> I have been doing the latter, and am still trying to figure out what 
> advantage there is to a window controller. What can it do that a 
> regular controller can't, and vice versa....? I'm still failing to 
> see their whole reason for being in non-document app cases.


  The point is just that the window controller takes care of certain 
tasks for you. Of course, I can't think of a single one right now, but 
it does. I usually mainly use it together with NSDocument, so it'll 
probably come to me the moment I turn off the computer...

Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
"The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere..."
http://www.zathras.de