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

Simply create a .h file with your class extension. Import this into your .m files. Incidentally, this is a great way to test private members without breaking encapsulation (I'm not saying you should test private methods :) ).

// MyClassProtectedMembers.h
@interface MyClass()

@property (nonatomic, strong) MyPrivateObject *privateObject;
- (void) privateMethod;
@end

/////////////////

#import "MyClassProtectedMembers.h"

@implementation MyClass
// implement privateMethod here and any setters or getters with computed values
@end

Here's a gist of the idea: https://gist.github.com/philosopherdog/6461536b99ef73a5c32a