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I am having a serious "best-practice" issue porting my iOS app to the Mac.

I'd like to display a (searchable) list whose entries are either other lists or single entries, for which the user can then show a detail view. Under iOS, this is simply implemented by using a stack of UITableViewControllers for the lists, with another (different) UITableViewController for displaying an entry's details.

However, under OS X, we don't have UINavigationController. It might be possible to implement such a structure via an NSOutlineView or NSBrowser (which are used to display hierarchical data), but I fear that the detail view (which could be implemented as a view on the bottom-most level in the outline view or as the preview controller for the browser) will look out-of-place then. In addition, I'd like to display the list in an NSPopover (as I do on iOS), and placing an NSOutlineView or a NSBrowser inside a NSPopover might look less than elegant.

Any (more-or-less) simple solutions?

MrMage
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  • How many items will be displayed and on how many levels? Can you tell more about the nature of the items? – tsnorri Aug 31 '13 at 09:00
  • It's a function reference for an advanced calculator app (PocketCAS). The functions are grouped into different categories, similar to Apple's SDK documentations, and there are about 500 functions in total (with one list containing all of them, but the others just containing a few 10). – MrMage Aug 31 '13 at 12:12

1 Answers1

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I ended up using an NSOutlineView which hierarchically shows all the lists, with a secondary popover (invoked by a button to the right of an entry's cell) for details on the individual entries.

MrMage
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