Cocoa: filling an NSBezierPath with an image

Question

I'm trying to find out how to draw a path, and then fill it with content from an image, e.g. a .png. I have tiles of various shapes (square, triangle, etc., each defined by an NSBezierPath. I can fill them with solid color, but I also want to be able to fill them with some kind of bitmap image instead of solid color.

Answer 1

I believe what you want is to clip the drawing in the current graphics context. Apple has good docs on this. Their code sample there works brilliantly, and is a canonical example of how to perform fairly efficient drawing in the graphics context configuring by Cocoa before your drawRect: is called.

Essentially, when your drawRect is called, whatever you end up drawing is automatically masked by the clipping path of the current graphics context (aka, the path configured with: [myBezierPath addClip]). addClip is a method specifically designed to modify the current graphics context, which is "locked" as the target of the addClip method before drawRect is called.

Answer 2

Jarret's answer is probably the best option, but if you wanted to avoid messing with the graphics context, you could also use NSColor's +colorWithPatternImage: class method. This basically lets you use an image anywhere you would normally use a color.