Source Lists feature in many Mac OS X applications. From iTunes to iCal to Versions, they are a great navigation control.
But for us Cocoa developers, they aren’t that easy to implement. You can easily create an NSOutlineView and set its highlight mode to “Source List” but none of the other Source List features come built in out of the box, such as the ability to display badges or icons for items.
I created PXSourceList to help address this issue. It is a reusable control (within the context of Source Lists) compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 and higher. It makes implementing Source Lists in your applications easier by adding the following main features:
- Automatic Group highlighting of top-level items – the text for Group items appears in a dark blue colour and is normally displayed as capitalized.
- Support for Badges – these are dark blue capsules displayed to the right of certain items that display a number.
- The option to display an Icon for each row – a small image that provides extra visual information for each row.
- Right-clicking support to display context menus.
Getting the control
The source is available to download from GitHub, or you can clone it straight from the command line:
$ git clone https://github.com/Perspx/PXSourceList.git
More Information
More information about PXSourceList is available from the project page.
There is also documentation available – a link to this can be found on the downloads page for the project on GitHub.
If you have any other questions then feel free to get in touch and I’ll be happy to help.
Comments — 15
Jan 15, 2011
Hi,
I love your PXSourceList. But I’m missing something. There’s nothing like “-(void) sourceList:…didEditItemAtRow”
Could you at that?? That would be awesome 🙂
Anyway thank you very much for this. 🙂
Jan 15, 2011
@RightThat’sMyName: Yes, there is a method that does that; it’s
– (void)sourceList:setObjectValue:forItem:
declared in the PXSourceListDataSource protocol, much like
– (void)outlineView:setObjectValue:forTableColumn:byItem:
declared on NSOutlineView’s NSOutlineViewDataSource protocol. It’s a method which notifies the data source that an item has been edited and it should update its model to reflect these changes.
Jan 15, 2011
ouu…thank you very much for your help ^^ :). It worked.
Jan 15, 2011
Hi Alex,
I have a question. You can detect that the delete key is pressed on a row.( in the method “sourceListDeleteKeyPressedOnRows”).
Could you make me an example how to remove the row on that the delete key was pressed? I’m not really familiar with Mac development (and your PXSourceList..but soon) only with iPhone development.
Tom
Jan 15, 2011
@Tom: You want to update your model first, to remove the item(s) to be deleted.
Then call -reloadData on the Source List to update the display; you may also want to change the selection by calling -selectRowIndexes:byExtendingSelection: to either remove the selection or alter it.
Jan 16, 2011
@Alex
Yes but how can I delete a item at a specific row? I don’t really know how to delete an item itself.
Tom
Jan 16, 2011
@Tom: That entirely depends on how your data model is constructed. The aim of the notification is to allow you to delete an item (if it can be deleted). This is done by removing it from your data model, and then calling -reloadData on the Source List to tell it that your data has changed. You can work out which row(s) are currently selected from the Notification object’s userInfo dictionary, which has the selected indexes stored under the key @”rows”, and this can be converted to the item to be deleted by calling -itemForRow: on the Source List.
Jan 16, 2011
@Alex
Thank you very much for you help. I understand it now 🙂
Sep 23, 2011
Hi Alex,
Thank you for this control, it’s awesome. The only problem I have is that the – (void)sourceList:setObjectValue:forItem: method of my data source isn’t being called. As far as I can tell outlineView:setObjectValue:forItem: in PXSourceList isn’t being called either.
Is there anything I need to do other than set the data source and delegate? I’m using the SourceListItem code in my data source.
Sep 24, 2011
Me again, I fixed it!
Jan 31, 2012
setAutosaveExpandedItems: is not triggering the itemForPersistentObject:
i see support on the code, i am missing something?
Jan 31, 2012
Nevermind
you have to set the autosave as well for this to kick in.
[sourceList setAutosaveExpandedItems:YES];
[sourceList setAutosaveName:@”TEST1″];
May 7, 2013
how to expand the group by clicking the group row
May 16, 2013
Hi,
I have used your control and its awesome. Now I have a small problem, I want to create an application like iTunes, which has dragabble nsoutlineview. Can we do this here.
Any help would be greatly appreciable.
Thanks.
Feb 13, 2014
Thanks so much for this!!!
I was pulling my hair out trying to get icons into NSOutlineView.
Add comment