Hey there. I'm struggling to deal with the two-phase initialization pattern that Storyboards push you into.
Some of my AppDelegate's methods open new windows. They do this by first by instantiating a new MainWindowController from a Storyboard, initializing some properties on it, and then calling showWindow.
When initializing the window controller, the storyboard calls an initializer whose signature I can't control (init?(coder:)). Similarly, when the storyboard automatically instantiates the MainWindowContentViewController. This is the two-stage initialization pattern I mentioned earlier. In attempt to work with it, I came up with this convention:
I've made a minimal demo project that illustrates my issue. In that example, I compare passing a toolbar button driven Publisher from the window to its content view. Because windowDidLoad is called after viewDidLoad of the content view, I had to move my content view's self-initializing logic to viewDidAppear (I actually meant to use viewWillAppear, but mixed that up).
Fundamentally, I'm trying to use dependency injection rather than singletons (or global variables in general), so that my AppDelegate can pass some objects to the window controller which can pass it to its content view's view controller, which can pass it down to its descedant views' view controllers, and so on.
What' s the right way to achieve this?
Some of my AppDelegate's methods open new windows. They do this by first by instantiating a new MainWindowController from a Storyboard, initializing some properties on it, and then calling showWindow.
When initializing the window controller, the storyboard calls an initializer whose signature I can't control (init?(coder:)). Similarly, when the storyboard automatically instantiates the MainWindowContentViewController. This is the two-stage initialization pattern I mentioned earlier. In attempt to work with it, I came up with this convention:
Each window/view controller has a custom "initialize" method with supplementary parameters that couldn't have been passed to init?(coder:). Since this isn't the real init, all fields set from this psuedo-initilizer are forced to be implicitly unwrapped optionals.
Each custom initialize method is responsible to call similar initialize methods of descendant views.
During viewDidLoad, a view controller can expect that its custom initialize method has already been called by the parent, and that the IUOs are safe to access.
By the time viewWillAppear, most of the the heavy lifting is done, so (for example) presentation of tab views can be very snappy.
I've made a minimal demo project that illustrates my issue. In that example, I compare passing a toolbar button driven Publisher from the window to its content view. Because windowDidLoad is called after viewDidLoad of the content view, I had to move my content view's self-initializing logic to viewDidAppear (I actually meant to use viewWillAppear, but mixed that up).
Fundamentally, I'm trying to use dependency injection rather than singletons (or global variables in general), so that my AppDelegate can pass some objects to the window controller which can pass it to its content view's view controller, which can pass it down to its descedant views' view controllers, and so on.
What' s the right way to achieve this?
