Subject: Re: NSStepper and NSTextField changes
From: Brad Oliver
To: Cocoa-dev
> You don't say so specifically, but from the description it sounds
> like you have the steppers hooked up directly to the text fields
> via the takeObjectValue: action (or one of its variants, e.g.
> takeIntValue:), so I'm going to operate on that assumption here.
Yes, exactly.
> So for example, if you have outlets to myTextField and myStepper,
> which you want to be setting the values for myInteger in your
> controller, you can create an action method and connect both the
> text field and stepper to call the action.
Yes, that appears to match what I have discovered. This seems
counter-intuitive to me as I'm not interested in the value of the
stepper, and in general I'm hard-pressed to think of a situation
where I would be, in lieu of the value of the control the stepper
modifies. In my case, I'm only interested in the text field.
Unfortunately, AppKit doesn't give me much help in this regard, and
I discovered this particular gotcha after I'd hooked up all the
controls. I'm averse to changing this because in this particular
tabbed dialog monstrosity, there are 600-odd connections, and this
brings InterfaceBuilder to it's knees when I start changing them -
it literally takes several seconds for each click to register in IB.
I'm also boggled that changing the text field through means other
than direct user input doesn't provide a notification of any kind.
It would seem to me that the stepper modification case would be
fairly common.
> If you have a large number of text fields and steppers to deal with,
> you might consider creating a matrix of text fields and a matrix of
> steppers rather than having lots of individual outlets pointing to
> all the controls.
This will definitely not work in my case, as these controls are
spread throughout many tabs of a dialog rather than concentrated in
one place.