CODEWITHSUNDEEP
objective-cxcodemacoscocoa
ribram
ribram

Reputation: 2450

OSX Cocoa using tab to navigate between child controls within a view not working

I am new to Xcode/OSX UI so there is probably something silly I'm overlooking. This is XCode 5.11 targeting OSX 10.10 desktop.

I have inherited some code with a few views where navigating among child controls within the view using the tab key does not work.

In researching this almost everything says to be sure to set the first responder and then chain your controls using nextKeyView.

I followed the steps in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRrE8eqp0dU (XCode 4, but all the functionality seemed to be the same for 5.11) to no avail.

I also had a look at this solution How to make child controls of view will get focus on Tab and Shift+Tab in NSViewController which sounds like a similar issue to what I am seeing, but one of the classes I inherited uses NSWindowController vs. NSViewController as the base and there is no loadView to override and the other which did derive from NSViewController did not behave any differently with the changes made to loadView.

When my window launches my first responder control (NSTextField in this case) has focus (blue highlight) but tab key is ignored and focus will not change unless I use the mouse.

So it's really not a tab ordering issue initially, it seems like a tab ignored issue and who knows what the ordering is. I tried setting focus to a NSButtonCell and NSPopUpButton using the mouse and then tab navigate from those to see if there was some issue with my NSTextField but they exhibit the same behavior. None of the controls are set to "Refuses First Responder" which was another setting it was recommended to check.

I'm at a loss and looking for any other things to try or check.

The first view I am having an issue with is: Window / Child View / Multiple Child Boxes / Multiple controls per box in case that matters or complicates things. It is basically for setting application Preferences.

The second view seems like it may be more complicated in that there is a single Window that swaps out its child view in a next/back progression (wizard interface). The initial window nib is "blank" so I didn't see how to associate a first responder from IB like I did with the Preferences window since all the controls are on their own individual view nibs (these all show as "Custom View" vs. just "View" for Preferences).

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1834

Answers (1)

ribram
ribram

Reputation: 2450

The resolution for me was to ensure that the "Auto Recalculates View Loop" setting in the Attributes Inspector was enabled for the windows hosting these views. This corresponds to the autorecalculatesKeyViewLoop property of NSWindow.

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions