How does an NSView subclass communicate with the controller?

Question

I am brand spanking new to Cocoa programming, and am still kind of confused about how things wire together.

I need a pretty simple application that will fire off a singl

Answer 1

First, your view needs a reference to the controller. This can be a simple iVar set at runtime or an outlet (designated by IBOutlet) connected at design time.

Second, NSControl is a subclass of NSView, which provides the target/action mechanism machinery for free. Use that for target/action style controls. This provides a simple way of setting the reference to your controller (the target) and the method to call when fired (the action). Even if you don't use a cell, you can still use target/action easily (NSControl usually just forwards this stuff along to its instance of an NSCell subclass but doesn't have to).