Converting a basic Cocoa application to a document-based application

Question

My team and I have been working on an existing, non-document-based Cocoa application. This is our first Cocoa app, although we\'ve done a number of iOS apps thus far.

Th

Answer 1

An often found suggestion is to create a new document based application and move all you existing code in there. This can be cumbersome for a large workspace with all kinds of stuff nicely configured. Let alone breaking version control.

I took the following simple steps and it worked:

• Generate a document based application

• from this this generated project, copy the following section from the Info.plist (open the file with a normal text-editor):

  CFBundleDocumentTypes
  
      
          CFBundleTypeExtensions
          
              mydoc
          
          CFBundleTypeIconFile
          
          CFBundleTypeName
          DocumentType
          CFBundleTypeOSTypes
          
              ????
          
          CFBundleTypeRole
          Editor
          NSDocumentClass
          $(PRODUCT_MODULE_NAME).Document
      
  
  

  and paste it in the Info.plist file in your own project.

• Copy Document.swift from the generated document-based project into your own project.

• it contains a method:

  override func makeWindowControllers() {
      // Returns the Storyboard that contains your Document window.
      let storyboard = NSStoryboard(name: "Main", bundle: nil)
      let windowController = storyboard.instantiateController(withIdentifier: "Document Window Controller") as! NSWindowController
      self.addWindowController(windowController)
  }
  

  It creates a new window just the way you application normally would. If you storyboard has only one windowcontroller the 'withIDentifier'-field can contain something arbitrary. If you have more window controllers in your storyboard, the identifier needs to correspond to the right windowcontroller for new documents.