[Rubycocoa-talk] adding to attr_accessor.

[Dave H. <gr...@gr...>]

Climb over one hill, find another behind it. I think this is mostly a 
plain Ruby question, but let's see what happens.

I have a RubyCocoa app I'm working on, a To Do list manager. I can pass 
a "ToDo" task to a subclassed NSWindowManager, and voila! I have a 
window with that task in it. Happy me! Make changes, make changes, have 
changes written back to the task, et cetera.

If I open a *second* window on the same task, however, they're each 
writing back to the task but not aware of what the other window's 
doing. Obviously (I hope?) my task needs to know what windows are open 
onto it, and when it changes, it should tell them all to update.

[Because of RubyCocoa's incomplete support for Bindings and whatnot, I 
have abandoned trying to do this with CoreData. I figure I'm probably 
better off learning this one the "old fashioned way," especially since 
it's not really that big a project.]

My plan is to give each task a "ViewsOfMe" array property. Whenever a 
task window controller opens a window, it tells the task it did, and 
when it closes, ditto. The task would tell all registered window 
controllers to update whenever one of its relevant properties is 
changed.

This seemed like a good plan up to this point.


But my Task class starts out like this:

		attr_accessor :title, :description, :priority [8 more symbols 
here....]

I *could* just replace all this with

	def title
		@title
	end
	def title=
		@title=title
		#put update windows code here
	end
	[repeat 10 more times]

But that seems horribly unRubyesque. I figured I'd just 
modify/mix-in/replace attr_accessor with one that also sets up the 
window update triggers. OTOH, I'm absolutely mystified how to modify 
attr_accessor to stick the updating code in the right spot. I cannot 
find any reference for how attr actually works. I couldn't even find a 
file that contained its code. One doc said it was in "objects.c" but I 
can't find that either. LOL.

Part of what makes this tricky is that I can't just add something to 
attr, I have to change something it already does.

Thoughts? Suggestions?