NSView Instantiation and Get Its Values with Identifier

Question

I have a subclass of NSView named clickView as follows.

// clickView.h
@interface clickView : NSView {
    BOOL onOff;
}

- (BOOL)getOnOff;

// clickView.m
- (BOOL)getOnOff {
    return onOff;
}

- (void)mouseDown:(NSEvent *)event {
    if (onOff) {
        onOff = NO;
    } else {
        onOff = YES;
    }
    [self setNeedsDisplay:YES];
    NSLog(@"%@",self.identifier);
}

It utilizes its drawRect method (, which is not shown here,) to fill the rectangle with a color if the user clicks on it. And it uses a boolean value (onOff) to see if it's been clicked on. Now, switching to AppleDelegate, I instantiate this NSView subclass as follows.

// AppDelegate.m
- (IBAction)create4Clicked:(id)sender {    
    NSInteger rowCount = 10;
    NSInteger colCount = 10;
    NSInteger k = 1;
    for (NSInteger i2 = 0; i2 < rowCount; i2 ++) {
        for (NSInteger i3 = 0; i3 < colCount; i3 ++) {
            NSView *view = [[clickView alloc] initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(50+i2*10,50+i3*10,10,10)];
            [view setIdentifier:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%li",k]];
            [view1 addSubview:view]; // view1 is NSView that's been created with Interface Builder
            k++;
        }
    }
}

So I now have 100 squares displayed on view1 (NSView). If I click on any of the squares, I do get its identifier. (See 'mouseDown.') Now, what I need to figure out is how to tell which square has its 'onOff' set to YES (or NO).

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

A. First off all:

Probably you are new to Cocoa and Objective-C.

a. Why don't you use buttons?

b. onOff is obviously a property. Why don't you use declared properties?

B. To your Q:

You can retrieve the views with a specific state by asking the superview for its subviews and then filter them with a predicate:

NSPredicate *clickedPredicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"onOff == %d", YES];
NSArray* clickViews = [view1 subviews]; // Returns all subviews
clickViews = [clickViews filteredArrayUsingPredicate:clickedPredicate]; // On-views

But you should think about storing the state outside the views. What is your app for?