Re: NSDictionaryController with NSTableView and sorting of numeric data

FROM : Kyle Sluder
DATE : Fri May 16 07:43:26 2008

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 5:30 PM,  <<email_removed>> wrote:
> It would seem that NSDictionaryController keys have to be strings.


Yes.  It is very common that, despite NSDictionary accepting any
object as a key, you must use NSString keys.

> So the sorting of numeric string keys is always going to be alphabetic.


Not true.  See -[NSString compare:options:] with the NSNumericSearch option.

> My solution was to discard NSDictionaryController and create a proxy object
> containing two properties:


I would instead suggest subclassing NSDictionaryController and
overriding -arrangedObjects.  The naive implementation would call
super's implementation and return a sorted version of the result.  The
published interface says that -arrangedObjects returns id, but the
documentation says that it returns an array, so I would feel
reasonably safe treating the return value as an NSArray.

--Kyle Sluder