Taking a page from the Rails philosophy, avoiding string identifiers in my code.
I've always thought using string identifiers was a bit fragile in Cocoa touch. Granted, I can't recall an instance where a mistyped identifier caused me grief, but the possibility always nagged at me.
In truth, I took to using #define macros to minimize typos in identifiers, but that still required coordination between the code and the nib/storyboards. I was not satisfied with that approach.
So I decided to take a page from the Ruby-on-Rails framework philosophy of "convention over configuration" and see how many string identifiers I could purge from my code.
The result: EMiOS+Convention, a collection of class extensions that nevertheless break the Objective-C convention of extending one class per code file.
These are just some of the generic categories I've found useful in apps I've built since I started this experiment, so by no means is this list intended to be comprehensive. If you have or can think of others, I'll be glad to add them to this collection.
What follows are the rules you must follow to use each of these extensions:
NSEntityDescription:
+ (id)entityWithClass:(Class)class inContext:(NSManagedObjectContext*)context;
+ (id)insertEntityOfClass:(Class)class intoContext:(NSManagedObjectContext*)context;
- The NSManagedObject subclass name must match the entity name
UIViewController:
- (id)storyboardControllerWithClass:(Class)class;
- (id)initWithNib;
- (void)exit;
- (void)exitDoorNumber2;
- (void)showModal;
- The Storyboard identifier for the view controller must match the view controller's class name
- The filename of the nib for the view controller must match the view controller's class name
- The Storyboard identifier for the Primary exit segue must be "ExitSegue"
- The Storyboard identifier for the Alternate exit segue must be "AlternateExitSegue"
- The Storyboard identifier for the Modal exit segue must be "ModalSegue"
UITableView
- (void)registerNibWithClass:(Class)class;
- (void)registerClass:(Class)class;
- (id)dequeueCellWithClass:(Class)class;
- (id)dequeueCellWithClass:(Class)class forIndexPath:(NSIndexPath*)path;
- The filename of the nib for the custom UITableViewCell must match the cell subclass name
UICollectionView
- (void)registerNibWithClass:(Class)class;
- (void)registerClass:(Class)class;
- (id)dequeueCellWithClass:(Class)class forIndexPath:(NSIndexPath*)indexPath;
- The filename of the nib for the custom UICollectionViewCell must match the cell subclass name
The 3 exit segue conventions are not useful if you need to pass values to the destination view controllers. I may address that at some point as time allows.
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