CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cocoa-touchmodel-view-controlleruiview
ChrisB
ChrisB

Reputation: 23

how to get uiview to talk to controller

I'm relatively new to Objective-C and Cocoa... I've been trying to understand how to correctly implement the MVC pattern in Cocoa/Cocoa Touch for a long time now... I understand the idea behind it; it makes complete sense conceptually: a model holds the data, a view is what that the user sees and can interact with, and the controller acts as the bridge between the two. View can't talk to the model, model can't talk to the view. Got it.

What doesn't make sense to me is how to use MVC efficiently… if the user can only interact with the view, and does something to interact with it (i.e. for an iPhone app, the user clicks/drags within a subclass of UIView, triggering the "touchesBegan" and "touchesMoved" methods, etc.), how does the view communicate these events to the controller?

I've looked at countless examples and forums online, but have yet to find a simplified all-purpose way of achieving this… I know how to communicate with a controller through buttons, sliders, and other things that you can connect to an outlet, but for things that don't have a target-action mechanism, what's the best way to do it?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions regarding what to do, or where to look.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 201

Answers (1)

Ole Begemann
Ole Begemann

Reputation: 135550

  1. The standard way in Cocoa to do this is the delegate pattern (cf. UITableViewDelegate). Your view class would declare a delegate protocol and the controller sets itself as the view's delegate. The view then calls one of the delegate methods you defined whenever it wants to communicate something to the controller.

  2. An alternative would be to implement the target-action mechanism for your view yourself. You get this more or less for free if you subclass from UIControl (just call sendActionsForControlEvents:) but it is quite easy to implement a system that works the same way for any custom class.

  3. (Edit: I suppose a third way is to have the controller observe properties of the view (with KVO). This wouldn't work well to communicate touch events but it is a feasible way if you want to notify the controller about a state change or something like that.)

Upvotes: 1

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