Vesper Mac Diary #9 - Not Going to Pass Things Around

Having gone to the trouble of figuring out how to pass an NSManagedObjectContext (or equivalent) from app delegate out to an NSWindowController and its NSViewControllers, I think I’m not going to do it.

Or, not entirely.

The benefit of passing things around is less-tangled code, which promotes code reuse and testing and makes for easier maintenance.

But there are three things to consider:

• Passing things around requires more code. It’s less simple than, for example, just calling NSApp.delegate.context.

• I never reuse view controllers, and I don’t write tests for them. I might some day do automated UI testing, but that runs against the app, not against a view controller in isolation. (I do test other things.)

• I’ve never had a case where a view controller wants something other than the global version of whatever-it-is.

I may sound like a short-sighted, non-OO monster at this point. Here are a couple mitigating points:

• A view controller’s data source and helper objects should take a context (and whatever else) as an initWith parameter. And the data source and helper objects should be tested, and may very well be reused. So, even though a view controller may refer to NSApp.delegate.context, its (testable, reusable) helper objects won’t.

• If I’m wrong, revising a view controller to take a passed-in context (or whatever) isn’t difficult.

So that’s there where I am. (Slowly and obsessively questioning everything, as usual.)