How to display sheet view in NSWindow - macos

Question

How do I implement the view in following image.
The view which appears when + button is clicked in System Preferences > Network
I have following questions:
Does this view system has a specific name (like popover), because I have seen it in many places in Mac.
How to implement it in IB ?
Can this be done in a popover window instead of NSWindow ?(or is it only possible in NSWindow like toolbar)
Update:
Updating the title for better visibility

Answer 1

In Cocoa these are called sheets. Take a look at the sheet programming guide, however, this is terribly out of date!
You need to call -beginSheet:completionHandler: on the window you want to display the sheet. If you have single-window application you can ask the AppDelegate for the window and launch the sheet like so,
// This code should be in AppDelegate which implement the -window method
NSWindow *targetWindow = [self window]; // the window to which you want to attach the sheet
NSWindow *sheetWindow = self.sheetWindowController.window // the window you want to display at a sheet
// Now start-up the sheet
[targetWindow beginSheet:sheetWindow completionHandler:^(NSModalResponse returnCode) {
switch (returnCode) {
case NSModalResponseCancel:
NSLog(#"%#", #"NSModalResponseCancel");
break;
case NSModalResponseOK:
NSLog(#"%#", #"NSModalResponseOK");
break;
default:
break;
}
}];
You will notice that when the sheet completes it will return a certain modal response --- we will return to this point in a shortly.
Next you need to implement the content that you want to display in the sheet; this must be done in an NSWindow. I find it much easier to use a NSWindowController and implement the window in a separate XIB file. For example, see below,
Now you need to implement the code in your custom NSWindowController (or plain NSWindow if you are old-school and love to manage your own NIB loading) which will issue the correct modal response. Here I have hooked up the cancel and OK buttons to the following actions methods,
- (IBAction)cancelButtonAction:(id)sender {
[[[self window] sheetParent] endSheet:self.window returnCode:NSModalResponseCancel];
}
- (IBAction)OKButtonAction:(id)sender {
[[[self window] sheetParent] endSheet:self.window returnCode:NSModalResponseOK];
}
The model response will get sent to your completion handler block.
Sample project on github.