Handling Callbacks

Question

I have a method in an objective-C class. It has 2 callback functions written in C. The class pointer i.e. self is passed to these functions as void *.

Answer 1

Generally, callbacks in Objective-C are handled by passing a delegate object and a selector to perform on that delegate. For example, this method will call a method on its delegate after logging a message, passing both itself and the message that was logged.

- (void)logMessage:(NSString *)message
          delegate:(id)delegate
    didLogSelector:(SEL)didLogSelector
{
    NSLog(@"%@", message);

    if (delegate && didLogSelector && [delegate respondsToSelector:didLogSelector]) {
        (void) [delegate performSelector:didLogSelector
                              withObject:self
                              withObject:message];
    }
}

You might call it in code like this:

- (void)sayHello
{
    [logger logMessage:@"Hello, world"
              delegate:self
        didLogSelector:@selector(messageLogger:didLogMessage:)];
}

- (void)messageLogger:(id)logger
        didLogMessage:(NSString *)message
{
    NSLog(@"Message logger %@ logged message '%@'", logger, message);
}

You can also use objc_msgSend() directly instead, though you need to understand the Objective-C runtime enough to choose which variant to use and how to construct the prototype and function pointer through which to call it. (It's the mechanism by which message sends are actually implemented in Objective-C — what the compiler normally generates calls to in order to represent [] expressions.)