Mac: Display hierarchical lists of data plus detail view (similar to UINavigationController + UITableViewController)

Question

I am having a serious "best-practice" issue porting my iOS app to the Mac.

I'd like to display a (searchable) list whose entries are either other lists or single entries, for which the user can then show a detail view. Under iOS, this is simply implemented by using a stack of UITableViewControllers for the lists, with another (different) UITableViewController for displaying an entry's details.

However, under OS X, we don't have UINavigationController. It might be possible to implement such a structure via an NSOutlineView or NSBrowser (which are used to display hierarchical data), but I fear that the detail view (which could be implemented as a view on the bottom-most level in the outline view or as the preview controller for the browser) will look out-of-place then. In addition, I'd like to display the list in an NSPopover (as I do on iOS), and placing an NSOutlineView or a NSBrowser inside a NSPopover might look less than elegant.

Any (more-or-less) simple solutions?

Answer 1

I ended up using an NSOutlineView which hierarchically shows all the lists, with a secondary popover (invoked by a button to the right of an entry's cell) for details on the individual entries.