Question

I’m looking to populate an NSPopupButton with the contents of two NSArrayControllers. The NSArrayControllers are both bound to my Core Data Managed Object Context and represent separate entities (in this example: Person and Department).

Within my NSPopupButton, I would like a list of departments, and the people that work under them. Like so:

Department 1
  Person 1
  Person 2
Department 2
  Person 3
  Person 4

All departments would need to be disabled by default, meaning that users should only be able to select people listed within the dropdown.

I’m lost as to how I would go about doing something like this. The concept of manually populating an NSPopupButton seems fairly trivial, but I’m a bit shaky as to best to populate the element with Core Data objects.

Essentially, I’m just looking for someone to point me in the right direction. I imagine there’s a right way to do this, and a number of very wrong ways.

Answer 1

Why not just populate it manually with the contents of the two NSArrayControllers?

You don’t have to use bindings in all circumstances, in fact a lot of the time it’s easier not to. Just write a small controller that handles the popup button.