when to use “willChangeValueForKey” and “didChangeValueForKey”?

Question

I saw these lines in a demo project, but I couldn\'t understand why it did that.

[self willChangeValueForKey:@\"names\"];
[self didChangeValueForKey:@\"names\"];         


        

Answer 1

KVO will operate correctly with custom setters for properties; this has always been the case for NSObject-derived classes. The runtime machinery looks for an invocation of the relevant setter method, and implicitly calls "willChangeValueForKey" prior to executing the setter, then implicitly calls "didChangeValueForKey" after the setter completes.

You can disable this automatic behavior if you wish to have more fine-grained control over KVO notifications. As mentioned above, readonly properties whose value you change by modifying the backing ivar, or whose values are derived by calculation, are places where you would use the manual notifications (although there is a mechanism, keyPathsAffectingValueFor, where you can tell the runtime that the value of a property is dependent on the change of another property, and it will send the change notification as appropriate.) To disable the automatic behavior on a per-property basis, you put in a class method + (BOOL) automaticallyNotifiesObserversOf and return NO.

I often disable automatic KVO notifications, because I have found that a KVO notification is generated when invoking a setter, even if the value of the property is being set to the same as its current value (e.g. no change). I wish to suppress the pointless notification for efficiency's sake:

+ (BOOL)automaticallyNotifiesObserversOfMyProperty
{
  return NO;
}

- (void)setMyProperty:(NSInteger)myProperty
{
  if(_myProperty != myProperty)
  {
    [self willChangeValueForKey:@"myProperty"];
    _myProperty = myProperty;
    [self didChangeValueForKey:@"myProperty"];
  }
}

A good discussion can be found in the NSKeyValueObserving.h header, that you can navigate to by CMD+clicking on the method names "willChangeValueForKey" and "didChangeValueForKey" in XCode.