Where can I get better Apple documentation?

Question

More often than I'd have hoped I seem to come across method/property definitions in Apple's documentation that are vague at best and meaningless, to me, at worst. For example, take the following method description from NSNumberFormatter Class Reference:

---

setPartialStringValidationEnabled:

Sets whether partial string validation is enabled for the receiver.

- (void)setPartialStringValidationEnabled:(BOOL)b

Parameters

b YES if partial string validation is enabled, otherwise NO.

---

So, let's just assume that the shoddy educational system I went through and any previous projects I've worked on didn't cover "partial string validation" in Cocoa and I would like to dig into it some more to see what this property is all about. Where does one look (aside from Google)? I hate to pester forums for something I should be able to look up easily myself.

I have come across situations like this enough times now that I think I may be approaching Apple's docs incorrectly. Any suggestions? Tips/tricks? 3rd party resources?

Answer 1

Setter methods like that are sometimes explained in more detail in the getter method, the introduction text in class documentation, or one of the documentation companion guides you see linked on the bottom left. Sometimes you can also find clues in the Cocoa headers, by right-clicking on the name when you're writing code and selecting 'jump to definition'.

Otherwise, there's really no other resource other than google, asking about it on sites like this or using a mailing list. You could always write some code to test what happens when you change its value. And of course, if it's something really confusing it's good too to take the time to file a radar bug report so it will hopefully be improved in the future.

Answer 2

Partial string validation is explained in NSFormatter class.