A puzzle I faced when dealing with the interface was was how to handle initialization. What can be done when?

I found that -initWithAPIManager: is called once to instantiate the plug-in and that is matched with a single call to -dealloc, as expected. But that call occurs very early in the set-up and the nib file has not even been loaded. No nib file means no outlets, so although ivars can be set up, the interface cannot. So here I just set up default values for ivars.

-settingsView loads the nib and initializes it. Once that is done, the objects in the nib are instantiated. This method is called next. But it has no balancing method to undo anything I may have set up, so I add nothing to this method.

Next, -willBeActivated is called once and paired with -willBeDeactivated which is also called once. The documentation says that these are called each time the application is made active, but this appears not to be the case. Now that the outlets are ready, this is where I set up delegates and will initialize the state of the interface elements based on the ivar values. Anything I do that needs undoing will be undone in -willBeDeactivated.

The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.

Tags: Aperture, Plug-ins, Cocoa, Random Wok, Initialization