MVC Design Pattern in Cocoa

MVC Design Pattern in Cocoa

Posted on  May 6, 2014  by  Debasis Das  — No Comments ↓

MVC Design Pattern in Cocoa

• High level pattern that classifies objects based on the roles they play in an application
• Its a compound design pattern and comprises of several elemental design pattern
• e.g of mvc pattern in Cocoa can be found in Cocoa Bindings, Cocoa Document Architecture, Scriptability etc

MVC Pattern is divided into objects

• Model Objects
• View Objects
• Controller Objects

If developers are adhering to this Design pattern and are creating their custom classes, the custom classes must fall into one of the 3 categories (model, view or controller)

Model

• Holds data and defines logic that manipulates that data
• All persistent data must reside in models.
• Model objects should not be concerned with interfaces and presentation issues.

Views

• Knows how to display the data and allows the users to edit it
• Views should not be responsible for storing the data that it is displaying
• Caching Data in View Objects is an exception for performance reasons.
• Views can be responsible for rendering a part of the model objects or the whole model object
• A large number of view objects can be found in AppKit Framework

Controllers

• Acts as an intermediary between the applications view and model objects
• Acts as a conduit through which the view objects knows about the change in the model objects
• Controllers are also responsible for managing the lifecycle of other objects

Combining Roles in MVC Design Pattern

View Controller

• Fulfills the role of both the controller and the view
• It owns the interface (views).
• Main responsibility is to manage the interface and communicate with the models.

Model Controller

• Owns the model.
• Main responsibility is to manage the model and communicate its changes to view objects

Types of Controller Objects

Mediating Controller

• Inherits from NSController class
• Used in Cocoa Bindings
• Some ready to use Mediating Controller classes are
  • NSObjectController
  • NSTreeController
  • NSArrayController
  • NSUserDefaultsController
• Facilitates, Mediates the flow of data between view and model objects

Coordinating Controller

• Provides services such as responding to delegation messages
• Responding to action messages
• Managing the lifecycle of objects (Windows, View Objects, Instance variables, Mediating Controllers etc)
• Establishing connection between objects
• Example of Co-ordinating controllers are
  • NSWindowController
  • NSDocumentController

The pattern as a (Composite, Strategy and Observer ) design pattern

Composite

• View Objects are a composite of nested views (view hierarchy)

Strategy

• View objects confines itself to maintaining its visual aspect and delegates all the decision about the application specific meaning to the controller

Observer

• Model objects keeps the view objects apprised/advised about the changes in its state.

 

Traditional MVC Design Pattern

 

Cocoa Version of MVC Design Pattern

MVC Coordinating Controller

Design Guidelines

• For mediating controller, use an instance of NSObjectController, NSArrayController, NSTreeController rather than implementing all the functionalities in a NSObject subclass
• Keep the roles separated for maximum reusability
• In case you are planning to merge roles, then pick the predominant role for a class and use categories to extend the class to play other roles
• Although it is possible to have views directly observe the properties of model objects, it is not a best practice. Avoid the temptation. A view should always go through a mediating controller to learn about the changes in a model object
• A view class should not depend on a model class (If this is unavoidable, reduce the dependency)
• A model class should not depend on anything other than model classes
• A mediating controller should not depend on model classes, view classes or co-ordinating controllers.

Sample Implementation