custom text data and undo
custom text data and undo
- Subject: custom text data and undo
- From: Jerry <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2005 14:05:26 +0100
I have written a specialized word processor that requires extra data
to be associated with the text. Using text attributes to represent
the data doesn't work out because the range of the associated data
can be zero in length (for instance, when no text has been typed
yet), and using text attachments doesn't always work because the
range of the associated data can be greater than one.
I was happy to see that there were methods in NSTextView to add and
remove custom data from the pasteboard. I overrode the four required
methods and hey presto when the user selects "cut" all the data is
moved to the pasteboard successfully and removed from the associated
NSTextStorage. Everything is fine...
... until the user hits undo. D'oh! Undo seems to be implemented
entirely based on private methods and undocumented classes. If
NSTypingUndo (I may be misremembering that name) even called
attributedSubstringFromRange: I could work something out, but instead
it invokes (at least in Tiger)
_undoRedoAttributedSubstringFromRange:. Overriding that is just
begging for trouble down the road, and I have no idea if it would
even work at all in Panther, which I still support.
So now I have a category in my TextView subclass that implements all
the cut, copy, paste, delete, and dragging functionality, just so I
can have undo work properly. I have spent a lot of time on the code,
and I will have to spend more time yet tweaking it. I have also spent
a week here and there trying to get rid of it. There is nothing I
would like more than to throw the whole dang thing away.
I think I must be missing something, because the pasteboard
functionality is needlessly limited in utility without a
corresponding undo capability. It just doesn't make sense to have one
without the other.
Thanks for any pointers you can provide.
Jerry Seeger
Jer's Software Hut
http://jerssoftwarehut.com
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