On Jan 25, 2009, at 15:54, Jeff Johnson wrote:
Ok, I understand. The question is, other than saving a few characters, how is calling xxxx more convenient than calling valueForKey:@"xxxx"?
It makes quite a difference to readability, I think. Also, Refactor... works on property names but not on key strings, and that's fairly important to me. Also, the getter can cache the proxy, while (I assume) valueForKey: creates a new one each time it's called.
If the property is mutable, then you're going to have to call mutableArrayValueForKey:@"xxxx" anyway, right?
Yes. I thought I found a way of returning that conditionally from a single getter, but I think I was just mistaken. So, mutable access needs a different name, e.g. "mutableXxxx". (IAC, the method's return type really ought to be different -- NSMutableArray instead of NSArray.)
If you're just dealing with a read-only property, I suppose that one option would be to give the property and getter a different name than the key. This could be justified in the sense that the property is public but the implementation via KVC is a private implementation detail. Then it would be safe to call valueForKey: in your getter.
Yes. That's a possibility ("immutableXxxx"). The drawback is that it leaves a big hole. Part of what I'm doing is laying down coding patterns for others to follow when implementing classes, and, though a rule like "Don't ever write a getter for an array property" is easy to remember, it's even easier to forget.
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