Xcode 8 and the issue with Storyboards

Cocoa Programming for OS X (5th Edition) 9. NSArrayController
1

I am trying to work with the examples on your book. For this chapter, your example does not work with the storyboards, but when I set the project, it starts with one already. Then, I do not know how to “add” the view and data to fit and run properly in order for me to see the results. Please advise me how to proceed. Should I follow an alternate way to start the example? I am finding very frustrating to follow the book along with the new Xcode version…

Thanks for your help on this!!!

luis

2

I had a problem with NSArrayController in this chapter also, and I was very frustrating but I succeeded in the end: (Swift 3, Xcode 8.31).

  1. Start the project with defaults (AppDelegatee.swift, ViewController.swift, Document.swift, Main.storyboard)
  2. Add an Employee class as described in the book
  3. Add employees in Document as described in the book
  4. do not touch (for now) AppDelegate and ViewController files
  5. In Main.storyboard find ArrayController in Object Library and add it to the View Controller Scene in outline
  6. In ArrayController’s Attributes Inspector find Class Name and enter RaiseMan.Employee
  7. In ArrayController’s Bindings Inspector find ContentArray, bind to View Controller and in Model Key Path enter representedObject.employees
  8. In Document.swift add in the end of the func MakeWindowControllers, after self.addWindowController(windowController: windowController.contentViewController!.representedObject = windowController.document

for me it works perfectly

3

I tried the same as you, setting representedObject of the ViewController to the Document instance:

let viewController = windowController.contentViewController as! ViewController
viewController.representedObject = windowController.document

This almost works, the only problem is that, while using the RaiseMan app, if I close a document window, I get the following error on the debugger:

2017-04-26 19:12:14.828877-0300 RaiseMan[68170:1704702] [General] Cannot remove an observer <NSAutounbinderObservance 0x608000023180> for the key path "representedObject.employees" from <RaiseMan.ViewController 0x6080000c34f0>, most likely because the value for the key "representedObject" has changed without an appropriate KVO notification being sent. Check the KVO-compliance of the RaiseMan.ViewController class.

I’m assuming we shouldn’t set the representedObject to the Document, but should instead set it to a model object like suggested in this Apple Q&A link: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/qa/qa1871/_index.html

Thinking of that, I also tried the following:

viewController.representedObject = employees

That works (also updating the ArrayController binding to just representedObject instead of representedObject.employees): I don’t get the debugger error and everything seems cool. However, it breaks down in chapter 11 because now I can’t override insertValue(), removeValue() and such which are necessary for undo.

So I wonder, does anyone have a definitive solution for this?

4

So… the plot thickens…

I just realized this bit of code in the ViewController:

override var representedObject: Any? {
    didSet {
        // Update the view, if already loaded.
    }
}

This is template code that’s generated by creating the Xcode project. My guess is this override is breaking KVO for the representedObject key, so I took it out… and guess what, the error went away!

So I think I can move on now. Hope this helps someone having the same issues.

5

Sigrist
Can you post your code?
Thanks,