CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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BlazingFrog
BlazingFrog

Reputation: 2455

How can I get to the menu bar in my app in interface builder

XCode works in mysterious ways (at least to me). I simply want to create a Preference pane in my app. When I run my app, the stock menu bar comes up (Apple, MyApp, File, Edit...) and the "Preferences" menu item is grayed out. It makes sense since I haven't started playing with it.

How on earth do I add/remove/activate/inactivate menu items? I'm not talking about adding anything new, simply using what should be there.

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1257

Answers (1)

Francis McGrew
Francis McGrew

Reputation: 7272

NSMenu has "Auto Enable Items" enabled by default. That means if the menu item does not have it's action message hooked up, it will appear grayed out. So in your case, you would simply set the Preferences menu item's "Sent Action" to whatever action shows your preferences window. This can be hooked to some sort of showPreferencesWindow: method of your AppDelegate, or directly to the showWindow: method of a window controller.

To dynamically enable/disable menu items the best way is to implement the NSUserInterfaceItemValidation protocol which is excellently documented here

Edit: Your app's menu bar items live in the MainMenu.xib file. The menu bar appears as a "Main Menu" object on the left hand side (if you're using Xcode 4) Simply click on the items to modify them, and you can Ctrl+drag connections to and from them like any UI object.

Upvotes: 1

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