pyobjc-dev

[Pyobjc-dev] Interface builder?

[Steven D. A. <st...@ne...>]

Hi,

Thanks for the work on a very cool project.

I'm just learning Objective-C and PB/IB, so forgive me if I'm missing
something obvious -- but is it possible to use pyobjc with Interface
Builder?  In IB, you'd subclass NSObject, add the actions and outlets you
wanted, instantiate an object from the class, and wire it to your form.
Then I suppose you'd write a class in Python that acted upon the items in
the form.  But how do you get the NIB to understand that it's supposed to
use the Python class that I've provided?

steve
-- 

Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Interface builder?

[Ronald O. <ous...@ci...>]

Steve,

Using Interface Builder is easy enough. Like you wrote you can subclass 
NSObject (or any other class like NSView) in IB. You then define a 
subclass the same class in Python and that is all that is needed to 
automaticly use your class when the NIB is loaded.

The easiest example for this is probably the TableModel2 example.

Ronald

Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Interface builder?

[<bb...@ma...>]

If you grab the Project Builder template from the CVS repository (or my 
installer package-- though out of date, this part works) and create a 
new "Cocoa-Python Project", the resulting project will launch and run a 
simple application that has a button that, when clicked, fills a text 
field full of information.

As such, it demonstrates both how to write action methods and how to 
create IBOutlets from which a connection can be made to a UI object in 
IB.

As Ronald indicated, you have to manually create the subclass of 
NSObject (or whatever) in IB.  Unfortunately, we don't currently have a 
"create source files" that'll create Python source from within IB.   
Well, maybe not true -- I saw in the repository that Ronald has another 
bit of magic in the works. :-)

b.bum

Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Interface builder?

[Ronald O. <ous...@ci...>]

On Thursday, Oct 24, 2002, at 02:01 Europe/Amsterdam, bb...@ma... 
wrote:

> As Ronald indicated, you have to manually create the subclass of 
> NSObject (or whatever) in IB.  Unfortunately, we don't currently have 
> a "create source files" that'll create Python source from within IB.   
> Well, maybe not true -- I saw in the repository that Ronald has 
> another bit of magic in the works. :-)
This 'magic' is already in the installer on your site, I just haven't 
wired it up yet. And now on to a description of this magic feature...

When you define a user-interface in Interface Builder one of the files 
that is written into the NIB named 'classes.nib'. This is a text file 
containing a description of the classes that are defined in the NIB. 
I've written a python module that can be used to read this file and 
generate a module containing class definitions. In your own code you 
just import this module and subclass from the generated classes to 
define the classes from the NIB.

Advantages are:
- No need to manually define 'IBOutlet' entries (outlets in Interface 
Builder)
- No need to manually specify the signature for actions
- No manual sync between definitions in IB and python code.

I'll probably change one or more of the examples to use this script, 
but that will have to wait until we've fixed some problems with the C 
code and have written some more tests and documentation.

Ronald