How do you change which view is active in a window?

Question

The program I'm working on right now is a bit cumbersome, as it starts with a central menu, and then once the user chooses an option from it it opens their selection in a new window, when I've got a perfectly good window I can (at least apparently) repurpose to that effect. I've been reading the manual regarding views, and I understand what it's talking about regarding view hierarchy and such, but the method of swapping which view is active is confusing me. What do I need to do to have it "sweep away" the initial menu and replace it with another view containing the content the user selected?

Answer 1

It sounds like you don't want to change views at all, but change the model you've loaded into the views.

The simplest way is probably to give the controller for the window a property by which the views can access another controller that owns a portion of the model (one such controller for every item in the menu). Then, you simply switch that controller.

In the setter for that property, you may need to send messages such as reloadData to some of the views, depending on what sort of views they are. Views that observe for changes using Bindings or KVO won't need this.

Answer 2

Found a simple solution by using NSTabView to hold each of the views I'm looking for.