Question

I am programming Mac apps with Cocoa.

How can I loop over/enumerate all the buttons, labels and other GUI controls in a NSWindow? I want to get the labels of each control

Thanks!

Answer 1

I guess you’d want something like:

- (void)addLabelsFromSubviewsOf:(NSView *)view to:(NSMutableArray *)array
{
    // get the label from this view, if it has one;
    // I'm unsure what test you want here, maybe:
    if([view respondsToSelector:@selector(stringValue)])
        [array addObject:[view stringValue]];

    // or possibly:
    //    if([view isKindOfClass:[NSTextField class]]) ?

    // and traverse all subviews
    for(NSView *view in [view subviews])
    {
        [self addLabelsFromSubviewsOf:view to:array];
    }
}

...

NSMutableArray *array = [NSMutableArray array];
[self addLabelsFromSubviewsOf:[window contentView] to:array];

Views can have subviews, so it ends up being a tree walk. In this code I’ve just used simple recursion to achieve that.