Question

I’ve created my own Delegate for a ObjC class. The class itself deals with Core Data operations. Delegate methods are used to inform other classes about changes that happened to the datastore. The class that deals with the datastore is called Datastore and it’s delegate is called DatastoreDelegate. A UIViewController of mine (ContactsViewController) implements the delegate.

My DatastoreDelegate is declared as followed:

@class Datastore;
@protocol DatastoreDelegate <NSObject>;
@optional
- (void)didAddMessage:(Message *)message;
- (void)didUpdateContact:(Contact *)contact;
- (void)didAddContact:(Contact *)contact;
- (void)didUpdateContact:(Contact *)contact;
- (void)didDeleteContacts;
@end

The weird thing is, my code all worked fine with these methods except for the [didAddMessage:] method. Whenever I try to call this delegate from within the Datastore class I get an error from the ContactsViewController. The error tells me the [didAddMessage:] selector is missing in the ContactsViewController instance (Unrecognized selector sent to instance). How can the selector be missing if it’s optional?

I should note that my Datastore class is a Singleton. I’m not sure if this is somehow related to this issue I’m having.

Answer 1

“Optional” means the caller is responsible for checking that a target responds to a given selector. E.g.:

if ([_myDelegate respondsToSelector:@selector(didAddMessage:)])
{
    [_myDelegate didAddMessage:theMessage];
}