How do you specify the origin of the arrow on a popover segue with OS X 10.10 storyboards

Question

I'm playing around with storyboarding in an OS X 10.10 app. I have an NSTableView that, when you click a specific row opens a segue that goes to a popover that contains an NSViewController.

How do you specify the origin NSPoint of the arrow for the popover? Right now, it just points to the NSTableView in the middle. I assumed that I could do this in prepareForSegue, but I can't seem to figure it out. prepareForSegue doesn't seem to have an understanding that the NSViewController is contained in an NSPopover

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You should file an enhancement request Radar for this behavior if you think it should be provided by the framework in some way.

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But to workaround this in the meantime, you can create your own custom NSStoryboardSegue subclass to help with this.

@interface TablePopoverSegue : NSStoryboardSegue

@property (weak) NSTableView *anchorTableView;
@property NSRectEdge preferredEdge;
@property NSPopoverBehavior popoverBehavior;

@end

@implementation TablePopoverSegue

- (void)perform {
    if ([self anchorTableView]) {
        NSInteger selectedColumn = [[self anchorTableView] selectedColumn];
        NSInteger selectedRow = [[self anchorTableView] selectedRow];

        // If we can pick a specific row to show from, do that; otherwise just fallback to showing from the tableView
        NSView *anchorView = [self anchorTableView];
        if (selectedRow >= 0) {
            anchorView = [[self anchorTableView] viewAtColumn:selectedColumn row:selectedRow makeIfNecessary:NO];
        }

        // Use the presentation API so that the popover can be dismissed using -dismissController:.
        [[self sourceController] presentViewController:[self destinationController] asPopoverRelativeToRect:[anchorView bounds] ofView:anchorView preferredEdge:[self preferredEdge] behavior:[self popoverBehavior]];
    }
}

@end

This can be specified in IB in the inspector panel for the segue (just like iOS):

And then in your source view controller's prepareForSegue:, you can just set up the segue:

- (void)prepareForSegue:(NSStoryboardSegue *)segue sender:(id)sender {
    if ([segue isKindOfClass:[TablePopoverSegue class]]) {
        TablePopoverSegue *popoverSegue = (TablePopoverSegue *)segue;
        popoverSegue.preferredEdge = NSMaxXEdge;
        popoverSegue.popoverBehavior = NSPopoverBehaviorTransient;
        popoverSegue.anchorTableView = [self tableView];
    }
}