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I mean, seriously, I don't get it at all.

I'm writing this app and I need to have a sidebar which changes the content of the main part of the window.

I read several documentations about the ViewController, WindowController, etc.. What I don't understand is how this is all supposed to be "simple" or even modular.

So, let's take this example.

I have this app which consists of a simple menu on the left side, and a main view in the middle which may or may not contain a sub menu (based on which page we are viewing). I would like these views to be on the same window, and to be independent from each other. The main screen should only display its content, and not know anything about the menu, the window, etc..

I created several ViewControllers, one for each view I want to show to the user, each one of them has its Xib file where I can draw the interface I want it to display.

How do I change the main view based on what the user selects on the left size? I'm not talking about the code per se, but rather about how the logic behind it is supposed to work.

Should the window controller know abou its pieces? Should the main menu contain the main window so it can change it? Should I use placeholders (Custom Views) in the main window to insert the other views in?

XelharK
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Your desire to make the main view(s) independent of the menu, window, etc. is a good one. There's no one single way to do this of course, but the way I would do it is to have the window controller be the object that handles taking input from the menu and switching the main view area to the correct view.

To actually handle switching views, I'd use an NSTabView which is made for exactly this purpose. You can set it up in Interface Builder so that it doesn't actually draw tabs, is 'invisible' to the user, and just switch tabs programatically.

The one hangup with a tab view is that it's not intrinsically designed to switch between multiple view controllers' views (NSViewController being a relatively new class in the history of Cocoa). So, you'll have to have the window controller keep (strong) references to the view controllers (ie. own them), and just have it hand their views off to the tab view as needed. I use this exact approach in a number of apps, and it works well.

Andrew Madsen
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  • Thanks a lot for the tips! However, I was looking for something a little bit more general. What if you were to show a sequence of views? Are placeholder views a good idea? – XelharK Jul 08 '13 at 17:53
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    Placeholder views in the nib(s) are just fine. You can replace them at runtime with the real views. In general, the high level controller (in this case the window controller) should be the thing that "knows" about it's children parts. Loose coupling between siblings (e.g. main view and menu) is good, and ideally an element shouldn't need to know anything specific about it's parent (e.g. menu doesn't know about window controller). Does that help? – Andrew Madsen Jul 08 '13 at 19:59
  • Sure! I've been working with several platforms, but cocoa's Views and view controllers are pretty weird and complicated I think.. I just needed some general guidance and 'do and don\'t's. – XelharK Jul 08 '13 at 23:08