Re: beyond MV and (one) C

FROM : Daniel Child
DATE : Mon Jan 21 05:57:14 2008

Ken,

Your explanation below was super helpful. I tried passing a reference 
to the app controller directly as you suggest at the bottom, and that 
worked.

Judging from the rest of what you wrote, I see that my next readings 
should be on delegation and the responder chain. I will try those 
approaches next. And as you mention, duplicate code was bothering me, 
so I will try to put the window-opening code all in one place as well.

Thanks!

On Jan 20, 2008, at 5:45 AM, Ken Thomases wrote:

> The nib should not contain an instance of a NSWindowController-
> derived class.  An NSWindowController is intended to be the owner 
> of the nib.  As such, it's outside of the nib -- "above" it, in a 
> certain sense.  So, when it comes time to load WindowC.nib, you do:
>
>     WindowCController* myWindowCController = [[WindowCController 
> alloc] initWithWindowNibName:@"WindowC"];
>
> In the nib, you would set the class of File's Owner to 
> WindowCController.  You'd also connect its "window" outlet to the 
> window in the nib.  Then, anywhere that some other part of the code 
> needs to refer to WindowC, you use this expression:
>
>     [myWindowCController window]
>
> If you want the WindowCController instance to know about the other 
> windows, you can add some ivars to it and set them up.  You can do 
> that immediately after the alloc-init statement, above, or actually 
> define your own custom init... method that takes additional arguments.
>
> One thing that might be confusing you: you might want a controller 
> which manages the window controllers.  Often, there's an 
> application controller, which might also be the application 
> delegate.  This application controller is what knows about the 
> various nibs and window controller classes.  So, it is what would 
> allocate and initialize the WindowCController instance, as 
> illustrated above except that myWindowCController would not be a 
> local variable, it would be an instance variable.  The application 
> controller would also have the "global" overview sufficient to 
> connect the various nibs and window controllers to each other.
>
> How does a WindowCController get a pointer to the application 
> controller?  Well, it could be given one explicitly by the 
> application controller when it creates the WindowCController 
> instance.  Or, the WindowCController can just use [NSApp delegate].
>
> -Ken