Beginner iPhone Development Questions

Question

I have recently started to learn about programming for the iPhone and after going through numerous online tutorials and books (most of which tell you to write this here without offering any explanation as to why or how stuff is working) I still have many questions unanswered and it would be great if someone could help me clarify them.

Here goes:

1) In Interface Builder, what is file's owner, first responder, and a delegate, and where is the actual code that draws the view?

2) When using Interface Builder and you add components to the screen, I understand that Interface Builder doesn't automatically write the code for you, but how should I handle the events fired by the different components? From a best design practice view, should each component have its events handled in a separate file? (would such file be the component's delegate ?) or is it better to just make the viewcontroller class implement all of the interfaces of its components?

3) When creating a UITableView for example, and I define the function:

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section {
    return [listOfItems count];
}

I am saying that the object tableView of type UITableView has this callback function. Right? So in case I have another UITableView named MyTableView I should write a function as such:

- (NSInteger)MyTableView:(UITableView *)MyTableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section {
    return [listOfItems count];
}

Answer 1

There's some big questions here and very hard to answer in a stack overflow post.

1)
A. What is the File Owner? The nib is a file right? So what would own the nib file? Well the owner is whatever object you call initFromNib: on.

AClassName *theOwner = [[AClassName alloc] initFromNib:@"nibfile"];

A nib file is just a freeze dried object, a description of an object, a serialization of an object. The object is often freeze dried with a bunch of helper objects to it can be unfrozen and ready to go. Remind me of how Egyptian Pharaohs were buried with many of their servants and many of their possessions, they would be ready to go in the after life. The owner is the main object that has been frozen. In a frozen state (the nib file) the owner is frozen and you can't work with it. When you unfreeze by loading the nib file the main object that's unfrozen is the owner.

B. What is the First Responder? When you interact with your program by touching the screen, shaking the phone, typing on the keyboard the program must respond to that event, many other frameworks call this handling the events or actions. The First Responder is the first object that gets to respond to the user's interactions. This will typically be the NSView that the user touches, which responds by redrawing itself and sending updated information to the View's Controller (Remember, NSView inherits from NSResponder - now you know why).

It's in the nib file so you can override the typical behavior. The Cocoa Framework is used for the Mac too so programmers might want to have a single object handle keyboard input rather than letting each view handling the keyboard input itself. This is rarely used in iPhone programs directly, because you typically want what the user touches to respond to user interaction (redraw itself) and pass on updates. So you can usually just ignore it in the nib file.

C. What is a Delegate? What does a person do when they delegate? They tell someone else to do this job for them and report back. People delegate all the time. I delegate fixing my car to a car mechanic. I delegate cooking dinner to the cook at a restaurant I'm dining at. "Johnson, I need you to write that TMI Report for me" said my boss delegating to me for I was company expert on TMI. Classes in the code are no different.

The delegate in the Interface Builder is the Application's delegate. The UIApplication class is going to hand off lots responsibilities to it by sending messages to methods defined in the UIApplicationDelegate Protocol. For instance if your delegate implements the applicationDidFinishLaunching: method it'll receive a message after the instance of UIApplication has initialized and finished its startup routine.

D. Where is the drawing code? Apple has provided with the Framework in classes like NSView, NSWindow, NSTableView and it's not open-source so you can't view the source code. But the reason the window launches and appears when your first run an application built on one of Apple's templates before adding your own code is due to what occurs in the file main.m .

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {

    NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];
    int retVal = UIApplicationMain(argc, argv, nil, nil);
    [pool release];
    return retVal;
}

The call UIApplicationMain(argc, argc, nil, nil) starts everything rolling. It loads in the nib file to unfreeze the UIApplication object and other objects in the nib file. Then it asks the application to start it's main loop. Once unfrozen the UIApplication object (the nib's owner) then tells it's MainWindow to display on the iPhone Screen and keeps the UIApplicationDelegate in the loop about what's going on.

Well that's my answer to 1). Took a while to write I hope it helps. One thing that really helped my understanding was: creating a new Window-based Application project, deleting the MainWindow.nib and then attempting to recreate it from an empty nib file, so that it functions the same way.

Answer 2

1.) File owner is the (generally) UIViewController subclass associated with the View you are building in IB (what you call GUI builder is actually termed Interface Builder)

First Responder is generally used in the background by the program to indicate what has control at the moment (generally don't do much with this)

The delegate is the file that receives the actions done on the view (and thus must implement how to handle these), (see below)

2.) Generally you will have a ViewController code file for each Interface Builder View (the File Owner). Generally this will be where the actions are handled for specific components (say, clicking on a button). You will set up variables (and methods for button clicks and etc) to handle each component from IB (a textfield or button is an IBOutlet, while an action like clicking on a button is an IBAction) As far as best design, I believe you should have a delegate for each view that does all the above, but I generally just use the ViewController as the delegate and implement it there (for relatively simple views)

3.) No, the parameter name (which is what tableView and MyTableView are in your examples) are used inside the function to indicate the value that you passed it. When you call this function you would call it like [myTableView numberOfRowsInSection:2]; and inside the function anything you needed from "myTableView" is actually referenced by the parameter name tableView ...That is for any function, but for UITableViewDelegate methods (like the one you are referencing, it will be called automatically by the UITableViewController if it's delegate is set to the file you define this function.

Wow looking back thats some blocks of text, my best advice would be to get Beginning iPhone Development by Mark and LaMarche , it addresses all this very well.

I'd also suggest looking at some of the very basic examples in the Apple documentation to get a gist for how Interface Builder and delegates are properly used.

Edit: as a commenter pointed out, the Stanford iOS course is fantastic and where i learned the basics (along with the book above)

Answer 3

Here goes:

1. In Interface Builder:
   • The "file's owner" is the Objective-C class to which your interface belongs. Usually for a view controller this means the custom view controller subclass you're creating.
   • The "first responder" is mostly there for behind-the-scenes handling of events; it's used to figure out when your class and interface handle events, and when to pass them up the responder chain.
   • A "delegate" is a general term for any object which receives messages about the actions of another object. In Interface Builder, it can sometimes be used to pass actions around between objects, or can refer to the "app delegate," which is a class that exists in almost all iOS projects and receives messages about the behavior of the application itself.
2. To handle events from your GUI components, the generally accepted thing to do is to define a method with return type IBAction in your view controller implementation, then hook it up to an event from a component. Then when that event is triggered, your method is called. It's not usually necessary to break them out into a lot of separate files unless you have a very complex structure.
3. Not quite. If you have another table view, you can call it myTableView , but you should still hook it up to the same table view delegate and data source, and the method name doesn't change . Let's break the first part of this method signature down:
   • The (NSInteger) means this method returns an integer
   • The phrase tableView: is part of the method name, and shouldn't be changed. A table view will always call the method tableView:numberOfRowsInSection: for the information it wants, so changing to `MyTableView* would break.
   • (UITableView *) means the first argument is of type UITableView
   • tableView means that the name of the variable inside this method for the calling table view is tableView

Think about reading through the View Controller Programming Guide - it covers a lot of these concepts and links to more documents that explain delegation, table views, etc.

Answer 4

See my answer to this question for an explanation of what "loading a xib file" means and the meaning of File's Owner and outlets. It's perhaps a bit advanced for a beginner, but if you really want to know the "what" of what's going on and figure out the "why do it this way" for yourself, it's probably a good read:

Put a UIView into a UITableView Header