Question

I’m having a problem with a custom NSPopUpButtonCell in a table that’s instantiated when the table view is populated via bindings and a NSArrayController.

The pop up button cell is created but when attempting to access the outlet by overriding the pop up button cell’s setMenuItem:item method it’s nil.
Is this the expected behaviour..?
Should another method be used to replace the menu at creation time?

Basically I need the outlet to link back to my controller (NSWindowController) for that document window so I can customize the NSPopUpButtonCell menu accordingly from the custom popup button when it’s populated.

A solution using bindings would be even better – but when overriding setObjectValue: I can see it’s only never called with a nil parameter.. using a stock NSPopUpButtonCell results in a properly populated pop up menu, though.
(see also Why is NSPopUpButtonCell showing correctly when only setObjectValue:nil is called).

Answer 1

You don’t need to override anything to populate an NSPopUpButtonCell in an NSTableView column. The thing to know is that you set the bindings on the NSTableColumn and not on the cell itself. Typically, you would have an NSArrayController in your xib that is bound to an NSArray containing all the options for the pop-up, and then you would select the column with the pop-up cell and go to it’s bindings. Like in this screenshot (note the populated Content, Content Objects, and Selected Object bindings in the inspector on the right):

If you want a working example, you can check out this project I whipped up for another StackOverflow question. There’s a bunch of unrelated stuff pertaining to making the NSPopUpButtonCell use NSAttributedStrings, but the bindings in the xib constitute a working example of how to bind an NSTableColumn with a pop-up whose options are populated by bindings.