Question

Say i create a viewController. Then I want to create another viewController that’s like the first one. Looks like a job for inheritance.

However, many of the task of the originalViewController are private methods and I want to minimize public interface.

If I declare those methods public then well, the objective of keeping private things private is not achieved.

If I declare those methods private, then the child class do not know those methods.

If I create a special .h files for the child class, it’ll be awkward.

So what’s the industry standard way of doing this sort of thing anyway?

In C++ we would use protected methods or function to accomplish this right?

Update:

I put

#import "BGGoogleMap+protected.h"

@implementation BGGoogleMap ()

@end

It doesn’t work. It asks for identifier.

Answer 1

In addition to what Catfish_Man suggests, you can make categories on your class that only your subclasses have access to. Here are the docs for how to do that. Basically, you just create a new interface for your class and put any private methods in there. Like this:

@interface MyClass (MyClass_Private)
// Method declarations
@end

Put those in Foo_Internal.h, and include Foo_Internal.h in your subclasses, but don’t make it public.