Re: NSDictionaryController with NSTableView and sorting of numeric data

FROM : Shawn Erickson
DATE : Fri May 16 08:05:18 2008

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 10:43 PM, Kyle Sluder
<kyle.sluder+<email_removed>> wrote:
> 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.


Consider using the built in sort facility...

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSArrayController_Class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/occ/instm/NSArrayController/setSortDescriptors:>

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/SortDescriptors/Concepts/Creating.html>

-Shawn