There are a few google results for this question but they are ancient and didn't really help. So I'm asking again for modern uses, how can I set up selection for a single row and column. Like the Numbers app. So the row/column its self is not highlighted but the focus ring is drawn for the row, column that was selected.
I'm open to Cell based or View based implementation. I have tried doing things inside the
- (void)tableViewSelectionDidChange:(NSNotification *)notification
but haven't been able to get things working or looking nice.
Has anyone done this, is there a better view architecture for this?
Related
Perhaps using an NSTableView as a form is a terrible idea, but I've got it working pretty well in every respect except that you can't tab from field to field.
I have a table with a label column and a field column. I also have an array that keeps track of each row in the table with its accompanying NSTextField control. The controls are set in the array as they are loaded during tableView(tableView: viewForTableColumn: row:).
After the tableview is drawn, I run through each control in the array and set its nextKeyView to the following control.
This works swell, BUT only for those controls which have been displayed on screen. Because the control isn't added until it's loaded, table rows which are off-screen aren't hooked up.
My current approach (which is awful) is to manually scroll the table several times in order to force everything to load, then set all the nextKeyViews. I haven't got it working very well yet, so I was hoping someone had a better idea. Force-loading all views, if it works, should be an OK solution, but there may be something smarter out there too.
I guess the answer is
table.scrollRowToVisible(<row>)
This will show the row you want to see.
I'm basically asking how do you correctly add a Combo Box to a Table View with correct layout i.e. so that appears as if you were adding a ComboBox cell to a cell-based Table View. Currently when I add it to the Table Cell View it doesn't fit (bottom half chopped off) and doesn't behave as its supposed i.e. focus ring is messed up, arrows messed up, not aligned correctly.
I have searched the net couple of times over and funny enough I haven't found an answer to this question. If I don't find a solution I might have return to good old cell-based table views.
If the combo box doesn't fit, you need to increase the height of the NSTableCellView. This is done in Interface Builder or, if implemented, in the NSTableViewDelegate method tableView:heightOfRow:.
I have a NSTableView with one column. As we know in cocoa, Table is column base. I want to create a login screen in cocoa with the help of table view in which there are two rows, one for username and another for password. I want to know how I use custom table in cocoa to create two rows.
Please help me out. Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
1) Read the documentation and search Google for any one of thousands of examples for implementing the NSTableViewDataSource protocol. Post back with specific questions if you run into problems.
2) Reconsider why you chose NSTableView rather than standard textfields and labels or NSForm or even NSMatrix. Using an NSTableView in this way is not only strange but its implementation will be clunky and weird.
Let me back that last point up a bit. Dialogs - modal or not - usually only have a few fields. That's what fields and labels are for. If you find yourself dealing with a lot of same-type input fields, NSForm is a better fit but has a few gotcha's in your case. An NSTableView shows tables and a single column of two or three individually-labeled fields is not really a table. Just use text field and password field, slap labels on them, and be done with it. :-)
I am trying to create a view for a kind of brainstorming application like, for example, OmniGraffle, with elements that contain textviews and can be dragged around. (Also, the should be connectable with arrows, but that is not (yet) the problem)
I did my homework and searched via google and read books about cocoa, but there seems to be no similar example around.
Since I am also new to cocoa, I’m a bit helpless here.
The thing I am sure of is, that I need a custom view in which I can create my elements - what I tried until now to do that is:
First, I searched for the syntax to add subwindows to a window to create my elements. Subwindows, I imagined, would automatically be movable and come to front and so on.
The problem: As the experienced Cocoa-programmers of you probably are not surprised, I was stunned to find nothing about anything like that - this seems to be something, that is just not intended in Cocoa?!
Then I thought about creating subviews that contain a custom view for the title bar drawing (where the user can click to drag the element) and a NSTextView.
Problems:
I read, that it is not so clever to create dozens of subviews in a window because that would be very slow (or would that be not so bad in this case because all the subviews would be instances of always the same class?).
Also I can’t find out how to load a subview from a nib- or xib-file. Would I need a viewController? Or would that make the dozens-of-instances-problem even worse?
And Apple tells you not to overlap subviews (okay, that would be not so important, but I really wonder how the guys at OmniGroup made OmniGraffle...)
Because of that, I now wanted to do the title-bar-drawing in the surrounding custom view and create the textview programmatically (as I understand, a text-“view“ ist not really a view and takes its functionality from NSCell to reduce all the effort with the views?).
Problems:
Even that failed because I was not able to create a textview that doesn’t fill the complete window (the initWithFrame: of the [[NSScrollView alloc] initWithFrame: aRect] just seems to be ignored or do I get that wrong?).
Also, there should be some buttons on each element in the final application. I imagine that would be easier to accomplish with a subview from a nib-file for each element?
Well, now that nothing works and the more I read, the more problems seem to occur, I am pretty confused and frustrated.
How could I realize such a program? Could someone please push me in the right direction?
I created a class for the draggable elements where I save position, size and text in instance variables. In my view, every new element instance is added to an array (for now, this works without a controller). The array is used to draw all the elements in a loop in drawRect:. For the text of the element I just use a NSTextFieldCell which is set to the saved text from every element in the same loop.
That way it is also possible to overlap the elements.
I want to build a Cocoa App with a list of entries very similar to the ToDo list of Things.app (see the screencast). The question is whether I should use
a TableView,
a CollectionView or
a WebView.
I think it could work with all of them, but which one suits the following requirements best?
have a list of entries -> 1 column & many rows
reordering with drag & drop
select single entries & use keys for actions like delete
open up an entry: the row should expand to show more input fields
customized look: rounded corners, shadow, background gradient
So far my research says that the TableView has most of the functionality, but is harder to customize in its appearance, the CollectionView doesn't have drag & drop (right?) but is easy to design and the WebView would take much effort to not hurt the user experience and I can't bind my model directly to input fields.
What pros and cons am I missing and what would you recommend to use?
A WebView doesn't make sense. You might as well create a web application if you use a WebView. An NSCollectionView is more for grid like data, like TV listings per hour.
NSTableView is the only one that makes sense in this case. I've implemented all 5 bullet points with with an NSTableView without issue. You need to extend NSTableView and do some custom drawing for the customized look. That's the hardest part.
open up an entry: the row should expand to show more input fields
You need an outline view. A table view is for flat lists.
Note that NSOutlineView is a subclass of NSTableView, so all the table-view features work on an outline view as well.
There are people who've done this already. One that I've used successfully is by Matteo Bertozzi and is available here: http://th30z.netsons.org/2009/03/cocoa-sidebar-with-badges-take-2/ It might take a bit of massaging to get it to work properly (especially if you need complex drag-and-drop behavior), but for basic functionality, such as getting the section titles and items in the list, it works excellently.
Edit: This has come up before and is a common question on the cocoa-dev email list. Here are some other options.
Just took a look at Things.app itself using "F-script anywhere".
They've used a subclass of NSTableView called "DetailTableView" which presents the condensed todo items. Collapsed todo items are implemented using a custom cell called "ToDoCell", but the expanded look you get when editing is interesting. In that case they've got a custom view called "ToDoEditView" which is inserted as a subview of the DetailTableView when required. I suspect this editing view is temporarily added as a subview in the correct location and the corresponding row of the tableview gets resized temporarily while it is present.
All pretty speculative .. I'd love to know the details of how this was done. It's an awesome UI.
I'm approaching the very same problem in my app (with one big list similar to the Things todo list) and I think a table view would make a lot of sense here.
The trick is having your cells ("rows") expand when double-clicked. That's about all the progress I've made so far.