Question

Hey guys,
I thought this would be an incredibly simple thing to do, but it’s proving trickier than I thought.

I want to be able to show an NSPanel that displays a circular progress bar and the name of the thing that’s being processed.

So, I made an NSPanel containing those controls in IB, then I created a subclass of NSWindowController. Created outlets for the controls and linked those up.

However, when I try using this code to display the NSPanel, nothing happens:

        [[[self controller] msgSubject] setValue:[msg subject]];
        [[[self controller] window] setLevel:NSFloatingWindowLevel];
        [[self controller] showWindow:self];
        [[[self controller] window] makeKeyAndOrderFront:self];

[self controller] is a method that lazily instantiates the NSWindowController subclass. I tried adding the call to makeKeyAndOrderFront: in vain, but the panel still isn’t popping up.

I tried debugging and what I found is that when -initWithWindow: is called, the NSWindow that’s passed in as an argument has all zeroed out instance variables, leading me to believe there’s some sort of IB linking issue going on here.

Any ideas? I’m guessing I missed something really obvious, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is.

Answer 1

Please post the contents of the [self controller] method so we can begin to see exactly how you’re creating and using the NSWindowController subclass. Are you creating it using the initWithWindow: method directly, or is that method (which is the designated initializer) being called indirectly from one of the other init methods? If you are calling it directly, that doesn’t really make sense to me as you said you already created the window in nib file itself. If on the other hand, it’s being called indirectly by -initWithWindowNibName:, then it would help to see that code.

NSWindowController‘s are primarily used/set up in 2 different ways. One way is to create an NSWindow programmatically, and then create the NSWindowController subclass and feed that window in as the window the controller will manage. The second, and more frequently used method, is to create a nib file that houses the window, which is what it sounds like you’re trying to do. In this method, you generally use the -initWithWindowNibName: initializer. As long as you pass in the proper nib name (generally without the “.nib” part of the filename), and that nib file can be properly found at runtime, and the file’s owner in this nib file is set to be the custom NSWindowController subclass, and the window outlet of this subclass is properly hooked up to your window, then you should be all set.

Might want to double-check to make sure that the nib file you want to load is actually in the app bundle. (I’ve occasionally forgotten to add it to the target so at runtime the nib file couldn’t be located and so the -initWithWindow: method would always show a nil parameter).