Re: Circular initialization of controllers in NIB file

FROM : Alastair Houghton
DATE : Fri Jan 04 20:24:25 2008

On 3 Jan 2008, at 18:59, Nathan Auch wrote:

> Alastair Houghton wrote:
>

>> No, that's not the problem.  Most likely you have chosen a name for 
>> your variable for which there is an unrelated -setSomeName: method; 
>> that method will be being called during initialisation, rather than 
>> just setting the variable directly.

>
> This doesn't appear to be the case, the name of the variable was 
> "main_controller", I've changed it to "my_main_controller" and 
> reconnected the outlets in IB but I'm still seeing the same 
> behaviour. In general, are there any best practices for choosing 
> variable names to avoid the situation you describe?


Not really, no.  You just need to be aware of the problem.  I suppose 
you could tack "Outlet" onto the end of all of your outlets' names 
(for instance), but I don't know that there is any convention or even 
that doing this kind of thing is terribly common.

If it isn't the outlet name clashing with a -setMyOutletName: method, 
then check that:

1. They really are connected in IB.  It's easy to forget to connect 
things up, or to accidentally disconnect them.

2. The object in question really has been created, and hasn't e.g. 
returned nil from its -init method.  (An NSLog() in the -init 
implementation should be sufficient...)

3. You aren't accessing the member variable from a point before nib 
file has been completely loaded.  For instance, trying to use an 
outlet from an -init method of an object that was loaded from the same 
nib file won't work reliably.  In that case, you should probably 
implement -awakeFromNib on your object to do whatever you need to do.

Kind regards,

Alastair.

--
http://alastairs-place.net