Question

I’m looking for an easy solution to delete NSTableView rows by pushing the delete key.

All I have seen when searching in Google were answers like this:
http://likethought.com/lockfocus/2008/04/a-slightly-improved-nstableview/

This seems to me an Engineering solution, but I would like to know if this is the best way. Does any one know a better answer?

Answer 1

I’ve implemented something similar to LTKeyPressTableView. However, I use array controllers, so in my subclass I added IBOutlet NSArrayController * relatedArrayController. Instead of handling delete request in a delegate, I handle it directly in the subclass since my subclass specifically deals with adding handling of Delete key. When I detect keypress for delete key, I’m just calling [relatedArrayController delete:nil];.

IRTableView.h:

#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>

@interface IRTableView : NSTableView {
    IBOutlet NSArrayController * relatedArrayController;
}

@end

and IRTableView.m:

#import "IRTableView.h"


@implementation IRTableView


- (void)keyDown:(NSEvent *)event
{
    // Based on LTKeyPressTableView.
    //https://github.com/jacobx/thoughtkit/blob/master/LTKeyPressTableView

    id delegate = [self delegate];

    // (removed unused LTKeyPressTableView code)

    unichar key = [[event charactersIgnoringModifiers] characterAtIndex:0];
    if(key == NSDeleteCharacter)
    {
        if([self selectedRow] == -1)
        {
            NSBeep();
        }

        BOOL isEditing = ([[self.window firstResponder] isKindOfClass:[NSText class]] && 
                          [[[self.window firstResponder] delegate] isKindOfClass:[IRTableView class]]);
        if (!isEditing) 
        {
            [relatedArrayController remove:nil];
            return;
        }

    }

    // still here?
    [super keyDown:event];
}

@end

End result is quite IB-friendly for me, and a quite simple solution for use in a Cocoa Bindings+Core Data application.