Question

I’m having trouble figuring out how to change between different custom views in my XCode project.

I have my Main nib file, consisting of 1 main window, and 5 custom views. The main window consists of 5 buttons, all which need to connect to the different views. So for example I click on button 1 and it closes the current menu and loads custom view 1.

I’m having trouble figuring out how this would be done.

I guess I would create IBOutlets for the 5 different buttons and the 5 custom views, and connect them to different methods such as openView1, openView2, where each method would close the current menu and load the custom view?

Could anyone help me code-wise how I would achieve this?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

So essentially you want a tab view?

You can make an NSTabView in Interface Builder. Set the number of tabs to 5. Then lay out the contents of the views you want inside that.

If you are happy using the standard system provided visual look for your tabs, then you’re done. If however you want to have custom buttons that switch tabs, read on.

With your tab view selected, set its style to Tabless:

This makes the tab buttons disappear. That means that switching between views needs to be done through code. First you’ll need an IBOutlet that represents your tab view itself: connect that up. Then write an IBAction method for openView1:, that might look something like this:

- (IBAction)openView1:(id)sender
{
    [tabView selectTabViewItemAtIndex:0];
}

Make yourself a button (that sits in your window somewhere outside the tab view, otherwise you’d only be able to access it from one tab!) and connect it to this action.

This is probably the easiest way to get going with an interface like this. There’s a whole bunch of ways to improve on it depending on how you want to structure your code. For instance, it sounds like you’re coming from iOS development, where you’d make a UIViewController for each tab. Well, on the Mac there exists NSViewController, so you can use a similar pattern: but if you do you’ll need to write some code that handles getting your view controllers’ views into your tab view. It doesn’t happen automatically through Interface Builder like it does on iOS. This tutorial should get you started if you choose to go that route.