Make sure NSTrackingArea refreshed in Nested NSScrollViews - macos

I have an NSCollectionView in an NSScrollView.
The scroll view scrolls horizontally to move along the line of items.
Inside each each collection item is a vertically scrolling NSOutlineView.
I have NSButton objects for opening and closing collection items - as supplementary views in my collection.
I set up NSTrackingAreas on these buttons to support mouse over effects.
This works correctly, until I scroll, at which point the NSTrackingArea areas are clearly left behind (the mouse over effects happen when the mouse is where the button was, not where it is).
I rebuild my tracking areas in updateTrackingAreas in my button class, and this is called, but not often enough.
I have tried using .inVisibleRect when setting up my tracking areas, rather than explicitly rebuilding them, but that doesn't improve the tracking update.
I have tried calling updateTrackingAreas on the NSCollectionView when scroll occurs, but it is never passed down to the child views as I expected it would.
As a side note, I also have NSTextViews in my collection view items with toolTips that are very flakey too. They are often left hanging. Pointing hand cursors over links are often misaligned.
It feels as though the default updateTrackingArea is over-optimised and is not being called as often as it should.
So, I am about to embark on building my own tracking-area-tracker to register and update my views when they are not updated by default...
...but maybe someone can see something obvious that I am missing? Thank you.

The tracking area setup can be subtly broken when nesting scroll views incorrectly. See the answers regarding nesting scroll views here for details:
NSScrollView inside another NSScrollView

Related

isOpaque not stopping passing to parents drawRect

I got a problem with Cocoa and its View redraw hierarchy.
I'm currently testing displaying (audio) levels in a meter style control and I'm using the MeteringView class from MatrixMixerTest example project from apple. This class is drawing the meter and only drawing the difference what got changed which looks like a very efficient class.
My project is splitted into 2 splitviews, in some are NSCollectionViews (Scrollview, Clipview) and in others are only static views. If I add the meter to those "static" views they work fine when these views call setNeedsDisplay:YES. If a meter is added to the view of a CollectionView Item it gets rendered, but loosing its drawn "old level" parts and its corners/background. I think this happens because the CollectionView item gets also called to be redrawn (which has a background image) and everything is gone. It is drawing some parts whats currently changing (the drawing works).
Is there a way to prevent the Item itself to be redrawn? Or, I dont know why it is not happening in those static views, because those views also have background images but do not draw over the meter.
Are there some tricks or whats different in a CollectionView than in a "normal" view?
EDIT: After reading about isOpaque (MeteringView isOpaque = YES) means it should not call the parent views drawRect if set to yes. Well that works for the static views, those MeteringViews do not call parents drawRect, but those in a CollectionView do however. I dont know why.
EDIT 2: I gave this topic another title, because isOpaque=YES in MeteringView is not stopping calling the parents drawRect in a CollectionView, in a normal view it is working. Are there some things to know about? I have to stop redrawing the CollectionView Item because thats the problem.
Thanks in advance guys
Benjamin
isOpaque is just hint to the system. It does not prevent other views from drawing their contents, it only means that it can sometimes skip making other views update their contents.
If your view is opaque, it should draw itself as opaque and completely fill its bounds.

Subview that expands with window using NSAutolayout

I'm trying to learn auto layout so I can set up a moderately complicated display the way I want. I'm starting with a simple version. At least I thought it was simple.
I have a content view containing a NSScrollView, and a zoom slider. The scroll view is, of course, just a window into a larger 'canvas' on which the user can do things.
I'd like the scroll view to be as big as the window allows, with the slider underneath.
I've tried many things none of which work, in some cases when I resize the window smaller, the scroll view goes on up over the window's top bar, obscuring the title and the red yellow, green, dots.. this is just a grumble, I won't attempt to describe how I got it.
I'm working with Visual Format Language.
The immediate problem: I can only get the thing to work at all if I put in a hard size constraint on the scroll view.
I've got constraints like #"V:|[ScrollView]-[ZoomSlider(==35)]-| and
#"|-20#1000-[ScrollView]-|"
With these, nothing shows at all, until I put a hard size on the scroll view:
For example, #"V:[ScrollView(>=70#20)]" and #"[ScrollView(>=140#20)]" results in a little tiny scroll view (as expected) just above the slider.
Window is resizable, all right.
Is there a simple way to make the scroll view resize to occupy the most space possible when I resize the window? The only way I can think of off hand is to produce metrics for the scroll view based on window size, and use a notification to change the constraints when the window size changes. There should be something simpler!
THanks.ee
OOps. Thought I knew the answer until I started to write it.
AT least here is a partial explanation of things that were causing me problems.
You can't add constraints that position or size the Window's content view. But apparently you can mess them up by deleting them programatically. Some of my problems were solved by getting rid of
[self.myContentView setTranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints:NO];
and
[self.myContentView removeConstraints:self.myContentView.constraints];
This left me with a lot of conflicting constraints. I fixed this be eliminating all content window constraints that I could in IB, then by marking the rest as placeholders.
I've got a ways to go before I understand how to use auto layout, but doing it in code is easier (for me) than doing it with IB

Problems with NSTabView autolayout (view based NSTableViews inside tabs)

I have an NSTabView which has 5 tabs. Each tab contains an NSTableView (which, as default, is nested in NSScrollView). This is all loaded from a xib file with autolayout turned on. I'd like each table to fully occupy it's respective tab. Using autolayout I select each tab and carefully setup the NSScrollView so that it snaps its top, bottom, lead, and trailing edges to superview. After I do this for the 5 tabs, I'll resize the xib to give it a test. When I cycle back through the tabs, some stay snapped to the superview and some do not. There appears to be some sort of order to this but it is beyond what I can explain.
What's really frustrating is that sometime this will run okay, and sometimes it will crash because of unsatifyable constraints. For now I am using springs/struts but I like autolayout and would like to get it working.
I am afraid that it is the nesting of the tables inside scroll views which is causing the issues.
If you lay this out your own nib, you should be able to reproduce it.
I am hopeful that this can be solved by adding NSLayoutConstraints at runtime, if OSX is anything like iOS's autolayout. Using IB you cannot assing constraints to anythign other than super and sibling (no cousins). This can be done at runtime.
I am hoping someone out there has encountered this issue and has a solution.
Why do the constraints in the layout show a fixed constant instead of auto? Could that be it?
You mentioned cousin constraints, I believe you can add in the in IB if you select two views in the document outline on the left hand side and then add a constraint. I'm unable to pick any two views in IB if I'm using the main window but I can do it in the document outline.
Lastly, you mention it will run okay sometimes but not others - and if that's the case it sounds like something else is adding constraints. Instruments should have a template for tracing constraints, if you can reproduce it you may get a clue to what is introducing the incompatible constraint.

NSTableView redraw not updating display, selection sticking

Although I know of a solution to this problem, I am interested if someone can explain this solution to me. I also wanted to get this out there because I could not find any mention of this problem online, and it took me several hours over several days to track down. I have an NSTableView behaving strangely regarding redraws and its selection. The problem looks like this:
Table contents fades in, instead of appearing instantly upon it's appearance on screen. When scrolling through the contents, the newly appearing rows also fade in. When you make a selection (single or multiple), and scroll it off screen, then make another selection (that should replace, not add-to first selection), the first selection does not get cleared properly. If you scroll back to it, it is still there, in addition to your new selection. This is a display-update problem, not selection problem - i.e. your new selection is valid, it is just displayed wrong.
I tracked this through the NSArrayController I was binding to, the underlying Array, sorting, all the connections, and settings, etc., but all that has nothing to do with it.
What solved the problem was:
In the View Effects (right-most) Inspector, uncheck "Core Animation Layer" for the Window's main view.
Can anyone explain what is happening here, and perhaps improve upon the solution ?
It looks like Core Animation and NSTableView aren't getting along so well. The "fading" effect is a by-product of the way core animation works. When you have core animation in one view, it is also enabled in all of that view's subviews.
I don't recommend using core animation on the Mac unless absolutely necessary, because some interface elements (NSTextView and NSTableView, for example) aren't compatible with it. iOS has much better support for table views and such using core animation, mainly because it was designed with core animation in mind.
I know that some more simple UI elements are compatible (NSTextField and NSButton, for example).
If you absolutely need core animation in the rest of the window, put all the other views in a subview of the content view, while leaving the table view directly in the content view. You can then enable Core Animation in the other view.
Commenters, feel free to add to the list of what is and isn't compatible.

How to "stick" a UIScrollView subview to top/bottom when scrolling?

You see this in iPhone apps like Gilt. The user scrolls a view, and a subview apparently "sticks" to one edges as the rest of the scrollView slides underneath. That is, there is a text box (or whatever) in the scrollView, that as the scrollView hits the top of the view, then "sticks" there as the rest of the view continues to slide.
So, there are several issues. First, one can determine via "scrollViewDidScroll:" (during normal scrolling) when the view of interest is passing (or re-appearing). There is a fair amount of granularity here - the differences between delegate calls can be a hundred of points or more. That said, when you see the view approach the top of the scrollView, you turn on a second copy of the view statically displayed under the scrollView top. I have not coded this, but it seems like it will lack a real "stick" look - the view will first disappear then reappear.
Second, if one does a setContentOffset:animated, one does not get the delegate messages (Gilt does not do this). So, how do you get the callbacks in this case? Do you use KVO on "scroll.layer.presentationLayer.bounds" ?
Well, I found one way to do this. When the user scrolls by flicking and dragging, the UIScrollView gives its delegate a "scrollViewDidScroll:" message. You can look then to see if the scroller has moved the content to where you need to take some action.
When "sticking" the view, remove it from the scrollView, and then add it to the scrollView's superview (with an origin of 0,0). When unsticking, do the converse.
If you use the UIScrollView setContentOffset:animated:, it gets trickier. What I did was to subclass UIScrollView, use a flag to specify it was setContentOffset moving the offset, then start a fast running timer to monitor contentOffset.
I put the method that handles the math and sticking/unsticking the child view into this subclass. It looks pretty good.
Gilt uses a table view to accomplish this. Specifically, in the table view's delegate, these two methods:
– tableView:viewForHeaderInSection:
and – tableView:heightForHeaderInSection:

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