Expose a private Objective-C method or property to subclasses

Question

According to some official talk, a class in Objective-C should only expose public methods and properties in its header:

@interface MyClass : NSObject

@prope         


        

Answer 1

Your only choice is to declare it as public in the header file. If you want to at least keep some method separation, you can create a category and have all your protected methods and attributes there, but in the end everything will still be public.

#import "MyClass.h"

@interface MyClass (Protected)

- (void) protectedMethods;

@end