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Preparing Your Custom Objects

As you develop your custom objects, there are some steps you can take to ensure that the integration of those objects into Interface Builder is a smooth process. In many situations, Interface Builder relies on your objects to provide the information needed to initiate certain actions. Wherever possible, Interface Builder relies on standard Cocoa protocols to get the information it needs, but some information, such as your object’s inspector class, must be obtained using custom methods.

This chapter provides you with the guidelines you should be following when designing your objects to ensure that they are compatible with Interface Builder later. Many of these guidelines apply to the code for your custom objects and not for the code you put into your plug-in. Some of them are relevant to your plug-in, however, and are called out as such.

Contents:

Supporting the Basics
Registering Your Object’s Attributes
Additional Design-Time Guidelines
Packaging Your Custom Objects
Creating Your Class Description Files
Providing User Documentation for Your Custom Objects

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