Question

Right now the API doesn’t seem to provide a way to detect if an observer has already been added for a particular NSNotification. What’s the best way to avoid adding multiple NSNotification observers other than maintaining a flag on your end to keep track? Has anyone already created a category to facilitate this?

Answer 1

One way to prevent duplicate observers from being added is to explicitly call removeObserver for the target / selector before adding it again. I imagine you can add this as a category method:

@interface NSNotificationCenter (UniqueNotif)

- (void)addUniqueObserver:(id)observer selector:(SEL)selector name:(NSString *)name object:(id)object {

        [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:observer name:name object:object];
        [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:observer selector:selector name:name object:object];

}

@end

This assumes that the you will only add one unique observer to each target for any notification name, as it will remove any existing observers for that notification name.