Does a class being its own delegate follow iOS convention? - ios

Sorry this question may sound "subjective" but I think it should have a pretty definitive answer. I have a class "LocationManager" that I want to manage my Core Location logic. I have two options:
LocationManager has a strong property referencing an instance of CLLocationManager. LocationManager is a delegate of CLLocationManager and receives location updates from it as such.
LocationManager is a subclass of CLLocationManager, and says self.delegate = self so that it can receive its own location updates.
I'm curious which of these options is considered the "right" thing to do, I'm sure that there must a be a preferred way. Thanks!

Subclassing CLLocationManager and setting its delegate to self should not be done because it breaks the contract of CLLocationManager. As the class is currently defined, it has a delegate property. This property serves as a contract which states that you may set this property to some other object, and this object will receive delegate notifications. If you subclass CLLocationManager (let's call it MyLocationManager), and if the delegate property of the object points to itself, then you will most likely create a situation where MyLocationManager only works as promised if the user does not use the delegate property for his own purposes. From a users point of view, MyLocationManager is a CLLocationManager without a usable delegate property. This violates Liskovs Substitution Principle, btw. The question to ask here is: would MyLocationManager still work, if some ViewController class decides to use it and have its delegate property point to itself (the ViewController)?
Furthermore, it is no longer "delegation", if you say self.delegate = self. So I would say it is preferrable to use variant 1.
Thanks for the question.

Yes you can do this with no problem. I've a subclass of UITextField which is its own delegate.

The first option seems right to me because it doesn't make a ton of sense to subclass CLLocationManager (#2). What functionality would you be adding to it? If you're not adding anything to it why subclass?
All you care about is encapsulating the messages about location updates. I'd say you're using the delegate/protocol pattern acceptably in the first case.
And Jef is right, there are times where a subclass of another class can be set as its own delegate. Though you need to be careful about how that object responds to certain messages.

Related

How to set CLLocationManager's attribute from other class

I am working on a sport project at the moment.
What i want to do is, when users select the AutoPause switch on, the CLLocationManager will pause updating location when speed is below a certain level.
Basically, i have figure out how to implement the locationManager by changes its attribute, but my question is, how can I set CLLocationManager's attribute from the settingViewController, whereas the CLLocationManager instance is in another ViewController. Thanks in advance.
You can use NSNotificationCenter to send notification to enable/ disable the CLLocationManager's autopause attribute in another View Controller.
Other approaches can be:
Use class method, it is explained very well in this SO Answer
Use Delegates
idk what' your problem with CLLocationManager, do you mean the way to pass object to another view controller? there are several way to do this.See this question:Passing Data between View Controllers
I'm pretty sure that you can pass the CLLocationManager object to settingViewController by setting a property of that CLLocationManager,because passing the object means pass the reference the object,you can change the object in settingViewController life cycle,and it affects the CLLocationManager object which created by ViewController.

Get UITextView text without delegate

I have tried to make a location autocomplete text view class by subclassing UITextField and use Google Place Autocomplete API. This works great, but I have a design error due to the implementation. To observe when the user types text, I set the UITextFieldDelegate to self in the custom subclass and track changes to the typed text in textView:shouldChangeTextInRange:replacementText:. This works, but here is the design error: If someone now wants to check what is typed into the custom subclass by setting the delegate to something new, the delegate of my class is not set to the object of the class itself anymore. Now the custom class is useless. Is there any way to either get the text as it is typed without the delegate, prevent the delegate from being changed, or in any other way fix my problem?
A few options I have though about that could work, but in a bad way:
Check regularly what the text property is: Should be obvious why busy waiting is a stupid idea
Override the delegate property and set it to private: Not sure if this will even work, but if it did, the class is no longer a proper subclass of UITextField and all delegate methods are unavailable when implementing my subclass.
Provide a new delegate for further use of the delegate: Allows someone to get the same things as the UITextFieldDelegate provides, but it still messes up the documentation and proper implementation of UITextField
Delegates in UIKit I normally one to one connections. Which can cause the problem you have described.
If you want multiple delegates of a UITextField I would derive a class from UITextField for example MYTextField and add a method to addDelegate and removeDelegate that maintains a list of delegates. The sent the MYTextField's delegate to itself and broadcast any delegate method to all listeners in the delegate array.
this post shows example code on how do maintain a list of multiple delegates.
Delegation to multiple objects

Alert view disappears on its own when calling [locationManager requestWhenInUseAuthorization];

I'm calling
[locationManager requestWhenInUseAuthorization];
on a screen that shows an MKMapView (showsUserLocation = YES). Which seems weird in the first place (Apple should handle this for MKMapView automatically, but XCode was complaining when I didn't do it).
So I get the alert view that says the application wants to use your location, but then the alert view disappears on its own.
Why does the alert view disappear on its own?
Only thing I can think of is that I am calling requestWhenInUseAuthorization in the initWithCoder method. I'm only doing that because I think I saw the Xcode complaint when calling it from viewDidLoad.
You're probably being ARC'd. Make sure that you still have a reference to your CLLocationManager. You can easily do this by making it a property.
ARC stands for Automatic Reference Counting. In an ARC-enabled project (and unless you are working on something really old or you turned it off on purpose, your project is an ARC-enabled project) you need to keep references to objects that you'll use later on. CLLocationManager doesn't return a singleton so you need to keep a reference to it in your classes that care. Something like this:
#property (strong, nonatomic) CLLocationManager *locationManager
See Apple's ARC documentation for details. (And thanks Falko for hunting down the deep link to that.)
I'm putting Gobe's comment inline in case you didn't scroll to read it.
For Swift: instead of creating a local scope locationManager object,
let it as a property of your classes that care, like private let
locationManager = CLLocationManager() and then use it normally as
self.locationManager.requestWhenInUseAuthorization()

Why declare in .h when setting a UI object delegate to self?

Whenever I create a UI object such as UITextField programmatically, I do this:
txt.delegate = self;
A compiler warning appears and asks me to add UITextFieldDelegate in the .h file.
I noticed though that it makes no difference with or without, the code works fine either way.
But the compiler warning disappears. Why is this?
You don't actually need to set the delegate property on your objects unless you are actually using the delegate methods. For example, if you need to know when the UITextField is about to begin editing. If you don't need to know when these things occur, you don't need to set the delegate.
Looking at it the other way, if you make your class conform to a delegate method (by adding <SomeClassDelegate> in the .h file), and then forget to implement required delegate methods, you'll get a warning from the compiler, and a crash when the app runs (and sends a required delegate message to your object).
To answer your question about not adding UITextFieldDelegate to your .h file, imagine your friend is looking for a French translator. You find a foreign looking man and introduce him. Your friend asks "But can he speak French?" You reply "I don't know". This is your warning.

Calling the delegate methods

Still I couldn't understand completely how these delegate methods are getting called.
I have UIViewController,UITextFieldDelegate in one class which will call its delegate methods without specifying like textField.delegate = self;
But for some different purposes like UIWebViewDelegate we are supposed to enter like webView.delegate = self; and it seems like it is calling its delegate methods. Perfect.
But now I am facing a problem. I am using CLLocationManagerDelegate and also CALayer in same class. For both I am giving location.delegate =self; and layer.delegate =self; At some point both are conflicting each other and only one of the thing is working either CLLocationManagerDelegate or CALayer. The other thing is getting stopped. I don't why it so happens like this? Any reason? How can we overcome this. Even I planned to use some other frameWork, say UIWebView . I will face same problem for those delegate methods also. Can you tell me why it is working in that way ?
The classes that will call its delegates without you specifying them have default implementations, which means that they already know what to do, and will only change their behavior if you override these methods.
Setting 2 or more classes to the same delegate should not interfere with each other (unless for a very weird reason in where the method is named the same in both custom classes).
Your problem is most likely the fact that you havent implemented those methods or are using those classes wrong.
For example, Location manager requires you to create an instance, configure it and START running updates. The most common method for a delegate of this type is the "did update location" (or something like that). Which you have to implement if you want to be informed of every time a new location is received. Otherwise you have to read the location manually whenever you desire.
As a suggestion, every time you set a delegate for an object, you have to do the object.delegate = self; thing. And you probably noticed that you will get a warning until you specify in the header that it conforms to that protocol: for example.
Just control click the UITextFieldDelegate word.
Look for the methods under #required, THOSE you have to always implement. the #optional have default implementations so unless you wanna change the behavior its not needed to implement them.

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