Question

I have a Cocoa app with a ManMenu.xib, in which the main menu is stored and different other subviews in several xibs handling different tasks of my app. So how do I make my sub-xibs or rather their NSViewControllerController receive actions from the menu?

i have an idea but I don’t know if it’s the right way: I subclass NSViewController and add some actions like – (IBAction)undo or – (IBAction)redo use instances of it as the files owner. Further I add a pointer to my app delegate pointing at the actual view or rather its controller and the menu sends the action to that pointer.

Wise solution?

Answer 1

You should hook up your menu items to the First Responder. Their action messages will then travel along the responder chain until they reach something that responds to them.

You’ll need to make sure your view controller is in the responder chain by setting it as the next responder of something else in the responder chain. I would suggest the window controller.

Speaking of the window controller, you probably should be handling undo there rather than in a view controller—it would be confusing for different views in the same window to have different undo lists. The only exception I can think of would be if the controlled views correspond to document tabs, like in Photoshop or Xcode.