How to use NSViewController in an NSDocument-based Cocoa app

Question

I\'ve got plenty of experience with iOS, but Cocoa has me a bit confused. I read through several Apple docs on Cocoa but there are still details that I could not find anywhe

Answer 1

I'm relatively new to this myself but hopefully I can add a little insight.

You can use the view controllers much as you would in ios. You can set outlets and targets and such. For NSDocument-based apps you can use a view controller or the window controller but I think for most applications you'll end up using both with most of the logic being in the view controller. Put the logic wherever it makes the most sense. For example, if your nsdocument can have multiple window types then use the view controller for logic specific to each type and the window controller for logic that applies to all the types.

The representedObject property is primarily associated with Cocoa bindings. While I am beginning to become familiar with bindings I don't have enough background to go into detail here. But a search through the bindings programming guide might be helpful. In general bindings can take the place of a lot of data source code you would need to write on ios. When it works it's magical. When it doesn't work it's like debugging magic. It can be a challenge to see where things went wrong.