I'm still trying to gain a deep and thorough understanding of
bindings. I've made a very small app in which I am establishing a
binding programmatically. I see different behaviors depending upon
how I describe the bound property. Let me first describe my rather
trivial app:
0) my app has an AppController object that is instantiated in the
main Nib
1) on the main Nib's window is an NSTextField that is connected (via
Nib loading) to an outlet of the AppController (named "valueTextField")
2) my app has a Person class with a single property "age" which is
KVC compliant (also: the underlying age ivar is initialized to 0 in
Person's -init)
3) the Person class has an -increaseAge instance method (which uses
the accessors to get then set the age, so it is KVO compliant)
4) the AppController instantiates a single person object (in its init
method) and holds on to this with an ivar
5) also on the main window is an NSButton that is connected to an
action handler in the AppController -- which in turn invokes [person
increaseAge];
6) in the AppController's awakeFromNib, I bind the person object's
age property (key?) to the NSTextField thusly:
[valueTextField bind:@"value"
toObject:person
withKeyPath:@"age"
options:nil];
The app works -- when I press the button, the displayed age
increases. Wonderful... but here's my questions:
(btw: context: Tiger 10.4.11 using Xcode 2.4.1)
1) from what (or where) does the property "value" of the NSTextField
arise? Neither the class reference for NSTextField or NSControl have
such an instance method (at least not that I've yet found).
2) I used "value" for the binding because that is how I saw some
sample code. Given that I don't quite know what "value" is, I changed
to bind to "intValue" (presuming that setIntValue would be invoked on
the textField). This works, but changed the behavior of the app in
one small way:
In the Nib, the valueTextField has a string value "hello" in place
because I wanted to see if the initial value of the Person's object
would be displayed when the binding is established. When I bind to
"value" the textField is immediately set to 0 (that is, I never see
the word "hello"), but NOT when I bind to "intValue" the textField
shows "hello" until I click the button to increase the age property
-- why the difference?
3) Then I got curious about what ensures compliance of data types,
and wondered if II'd cause runtime errors if I passed the wrong data
type, so I tried changing the bind invocation to bind to
"stringValue" -- that worked just fine. As did binding to
"floatValue". I'm presuming something must be coercing the person
object's age (which is int data) but what? Is this an artifact of the
control, the textField, or the binding mechanism?
4) Further, using "floatValue" does not cause the initial value of
age (0) to be displayed (same result as with intValue), but using
stringValue does (which matches use of "value"). Why?
TIA.
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