Re: Okay I have those pieces... now where's the g lue?

FROM : Nathan
DATE : Tue May 27 23:16:21 2008

I'm not joining your discussion here, just giving you a nice linkie. 
Cocoalab.com has done a great job with their tutorial, becomeanxcoder 
or something like that. It assumes you have no knowledge of C, and it 
has put me into a great position, I'm able to use other tutorials now.

On May 27, 2008, at 5:09 PM, Erik Buck wrote:

>> How do I allow controller A to send commands to controller B and vice
>> versa? If controller A initialized controller B, then A knew about 
>> B, but
>> what about the other way round?

>
>  1) A can have an instance variable that points to B.
>  2) B can have an instance variable that points to A.
>  3) A can be the delegate of B. (specialization of 2)
>  4) B can send notifications that A observes.
>  5) B can send messages up the responder chain.  If A is in the 
> responder chain it will get a chance to respond to the message 
> unless some object earlier in the chain consumes the message.
>  6) B can access A through a global variable...perhaps [[NSApp 
> delegate] doSomething];
>  7) A can observe properties of B. (not recommended for newbies)
>
>  Which technique you choose depends on the problem you are trying to 
> solve and the design of your application.  All of these techniques 
> are common Cocoa design patterns.  In a total vacuum of information, 
> I bet you want option 4.
>

>> But as only Controller A knows about B and not the other way round
>> this seems not possible.

>
>  This seems like a good scenario to use notifications or the 
> responder chain.
>

>> I have created a NSPopupButton in IB. I also created some MenuItems
>> for it in IB.
>> How can I identify the current menu item?

>
>  Don't store application state information in user interfaces.
>  Have each menu item send a different action to your controller and 
> have the controller update the model accordingly.  Don't poll the 
> state of a user interface item.
>
>  Alternately, have all of the menu items send the same action and 
> use the menu item's tag or representedObject or even its index to 
> determine which menu item was selected.  Then have the controller 
> update the model accordingly.  Don't poll the state of a user 
> interface item.
>

>> Ps: Is there any generic(!) open source app that you would recommend
>> me to study to learn more about how to structure an app at best?

>
>  Many Cocoa developers learned via the Sketch sample application or 
> its predecessor.  There are many good Cocoa examples on your hard 
> disk and at developer.apple.com.  There are also opensource Cocoa 
> projects that you can find with Google.
>
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