On 20 Dec 2008, at 2:28 pm, Ken Thomases wrote:
First of all, are you familiar with Key-Value Validation?
http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Conceptual/KeyValueCoding/Concepts/Validation.html
So I'm looking for a way to safely and reliably determine whether a
property will accept an object of a given type. I wrote this
category on NSObject as a simple wrapper on the runtime to attempt
this, but it doesn't work quite how I expected - any property that
returns an object simply returns '@' as its return type - I can't
tell what class it is. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I don't believe this is possible. The "@" you're getting is the
type encoding for an object pointer.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjCRuntimeGuide/Articles/chapter_7_section_1.html
Note how it says "whether statically typed or typed id".
Basically, in Objective-C static typing is purely a compile-time
thing. The compiler can use it to check the semantics of your
program. However, it's "lost" after that. It's not baked into the
resulting executable. Therefore, the Objective-C runtime can't
access it. It just isn't there.
I think your only avenue is to implement explicit KVV methods for
your properties which have the necessary knowledge to test their
type. I suppose you could file a feature request to extend declared
properties so they can synthesize a type-checking validation
method. Or request a compile-time directive to determine the static
type of a method return or a property. (Hmm. gcc has a "typeof"
extension. I wonder if it works in Objective-C.)
Ken, I was only vaguely aware of what KVV was for - it looks like the
right way to handle this. So I'll investigate that approach - now I
come to read the docs in detail, it definitely sounds like what I
need. It will certainly do the trick to prevent a bad property type
being set, though that's a little bit after the fact. It's not quite
so clear how I could validate a type ahead of time so that I could
filter out inappropriate ones - but I'll give it some more thought.
On the second point I think you're entirely right - I sort of
suspected that might be the case as soon as I saw the results I was
getting.
thanks, Graham
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