Garrett on 12/18/2003:

Thanks everyone!

Garrett on 12/20/2003:

dez: Glad I could help. Your license is on its way.

Garrett on 12/22/2003:

Jon—I considered adding that feature back when WebKit was released, but I decided against it because we thought it might be adding things to a texteditor that aren't necessary.

But, due to the ease of WebKit use and the fact that I use it for HTML code snippets all the time too, I will add it in the next version. Thanks!

Garrett on 12/29/2003:

Josha—

I use an NSMutableArray to store document content. A simplification of my structure would be an array that looks like this:

Key => Data

date => [date here]
category => [category here]
content => [content here]

All my data is coded, so I've got a coding class that en- and decodes data for me. This means that when I want to get something out of the array, I need to use the coding class like such (where Coder is the name of the coding class and items is the name of the mutable array mentioned above):

Coder * item = [items objectAtIndex:0];

For example purposes, I requested the object at row 0 directly, although in your code you would rarely do this. You'll see what I mean below. Anyway, now item can be used to get data from that row in the array.

When someone clicks on a row in the NSTableView, I run the delegate method:

- (BOOL)tableView:(NSTableView *)tableView shouldSelectRow:(int)row

Which will allow you to get the number of the row about to be selected. I do necessary checking on data here, and if the document has been changed, I save it. Then I always return YES. You might not need to use this method... you might be able to go straight to this one, which comes next:

- (void)tableViewSelectionDidChange:(NSNotification *)aNotification

You use this method to actually change the data in the NSTextView by loading the "content" data from the selected row into the textView. It's pretty easy, just do something like this (where text is the NSTextView and table is the NSTableView):

Coder * item = [items objectAtIndex:[table selectedRow]];
[text replaceCharactersInRange:NSMakeRange(0,[[text string] length]) withString:[item valueForKey:@"content"]];
[item release];

Now you can see what I was talking about when I mentioned using the item object to get data from that row in the array. In this method the selection has already changed, so you can use - (int)selectedRow to get the number of the currently selected row and use that to get the data from your array.

Doing things like this would be fine, but you'll want to put in some basic selection logic first. For instance, what happens now if someone selects empty space in your NSTableView? Well, assuming you allow for empty selection (you could turn this off in InterfaceBuilder), you'll get an error. That's because empty selection in a tableView will return -1 for selectedRow, and since you don't have data at that row in your array, this won't work. And what happens if you have multiple selection enabled and someone selects two rows?

For the purposes of this example, I'll add some conditions so that the data in the NSTextView will change only if one row is selected and it is not -1:

if (([table numberOfSelectedRows]==1) && ([table selectedRow]!=-1)) {
     // code from above goes here
}

Hopefully this will help you out. Let me know if you have other questions!