Question

I have been struggling with this for some time now.

There have been many times I wanted to change something minor in a control, but I had to redraw the entire thing just to adjust it.
Like a NSPathControl, I just wanted to change the background of the Path Control, I ended up creating a whole new control just for that small adjustment…

Apple uses private methods, like the following:

- (void)_drawContextMenuHighlightForIndexes:(NSIndexSet *)rowIndexes clipRect:(NSRect)rect;

I have found this in a Stackoverflow-Post.

How should I know about these?
I don’t think they are meant to be public, but this is just WAY easier.
Where do these people know this from?
Are there any references? I wouldn’t need to know any source code, I would only have to know the names of the private methods.

So my question, how can I get the names of private methods of AppKit classes?

Thanks

Answer 1

Private class method names can be obtained using Obj-C runtime functions. To get a list of methods of a class you can do something like:

unsigned int methodCount;
Method *methods = class_copyMethodList(theClass, &methodCount);
for (int i = 0; i < methodCount; i++) {
    Method method = methods[i];
    NSString *methodName = NSStringFromSelector(method_getName(method));
    // collect name in an array or print it.
}
free(methods);

There is also a handy terminal tool that does this for you called class-dump.