Question

I have a view setup in Interface Builder which contains a viewController that loads another Nib file. However, for some reason the objects contained in the nib file being loaded never gets called awakeFromNib. What am I missing here? Is there anyway to load views from Nib in interface builder and also manage their properties and sizing in the interface builder?

In general, what are the best practices for managing multiple nibs and composing them into complex views?

Final Solution:

I created a NSViewController subclass like this.

@interface NibLoadingViewController : NSViewController

// The placeholder would be replaced during run-time by the view
@property (weak, nonatomic) IBOutlet NSView *placeholder;

@end

@implementation NibLoadingViewController 

@synthesize placeholder = _placeholder;

- (void)awakeFromNib {
    if (self.placeholder)
        self.view = self.view; // Trigger lazy loading
}

- (void)loadView {
    [super loadView];
    if (!self.view)
        return;
    // Replace the placehoder if it exists
    if (self.placeholder) {
        // Copy over relevant attributes
        self.view.frame = self.placeholder.frame;
        self.view.autoresizingMask = self.placeholder.autoresizingMask;
        self.view.autoresizesSubviews = self.placeholder.autoresizesSubviews;
        // Replaces the old view
        [self.placeholder.superview replaceSubview:self.placeholder with:self.view];
        self.placeholder = nil;
    }
    self.nextResponder = self.view.nextResponder;
    self.view.nextResponder = self;
}

@end

This way, you just need to hook the placeholder outlet in the nib that contains the view controller and it will automatically load the other nibs for you and copy all the attributes from placeholder over and replace it in the main nib.

Answer 1

The content of the nib-file is lazy-loaded. If you want -(void)awakeFromNib to be called, you need to access something from the nib-file first.

NSViewController *controller = [[NSViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"MyView" bundle:nil];

/*
 * awakeFromNib was not called yet
 */

NSView *view = controller.view;

/*
 * but now -(void)awakeFromNib was called.
 */