Apparently ivars that are bound to from a nib, via a controller object, don’t have an initial or default value unless I assign one either via code or via the UI element.<\/p>\n
Almost all of my experience with the NeXT and Apple APIs pre-dates bindings and core data by nearly a decade, but I’ve had enough of the kool-aid to know the lines of code I never write are much less likely to have bugs than the lines I do write. <\/p>\n
Lately I’ve been working on a couple of one-off apps for my personal use, and also to help my mom with gallery images for her website<\/a>. In the process I’m learning that the practice of bindings is a bit more complicated than the theory of bindings. <\/p>\n For example, I’m working on a simple application that takes a directory full of images, scales each one to a particular square dimension, and pads the shorter side with a user-chosen color. In the NIB for this app, I have an NSTextField for the target dimension and an NSColorWell for the background color.<\/p>\n I’ve discovered that when I launch the app, those IB elements that are bound through an NSObjectController to ivars in MyDocument don’t have an initial default value! For example one of my ivars is *backgroundColor, and the color well is bound to it through the NSObjectController. If I try to read that value from another method in MyDocument without first setting it either via code, e.g. backgroundColor = [NSColor colorBlack], or via the NSColorWell UI element itself, the ivar will be nil! I spent half an hour this afternoon using GDB to track this backwards through my set of Core Image filters before I finally figured it out.<\/p>\n Anyone know how to fix this? I see Core Data has a willReadValueForKey: but I don’t know if it would do the trick. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apparently ivars that are bound to from a nib, via a controller object, don’t have an initial or default value unless I assign one either via code or via the UI element. Almost all of my experience with the NeXT … Continue reading