Pointers for data returned by delegate methods in MacRuby

Question

I'm working on a small MacRuby project, using 0.5b1, which is implementing the delegate methods required for Growl (the app is using Growl for notifications).

I would like to be able to respond to the Growl callbacks when the notification is clicked, however when you register the Growl delegate with ::GrowlApplicationBridge.setGrowlDelegate self it asks the delegate for a NSDictionary* with the Growl registration information.

I have tried returning a standard NSDictionary instance, trying to coerce the object into a pointer etc, but every time I seem to get a segmentation fault (I guess this is because I'm passing back an object, not a pointer to the object).

I'm wondering if it is possible to obtain a pointer to the object its self, or using p = Pointer.new("NSDictionary") is it possible to assign the data somehow (using p.assign(dict) results in a type error as it is expecting an Integer).

I guess that the other option is to write an ObjC class to act as the delegate and just hook into that from Ruby, but that somewhat defeats the purpose....

Answer 1

A ruby hash is a NSDictionary in MacRuby. You should be able to do something along the lines of:

framework 'Growl'

def registrationDictionaryForGrowl
  {'TicketVersion' => 1, 'AllNotifications' => nil, 'ApplicationId' => 'test'}
end

GrowlApplicationBridge.setGrowlDelegate(self)

Although, I don't have the keys set properly for the growl dictionary (which I believe is due to passing nil to the AllNotifications key. Hopefully, passing in an array of real notifications should work):

2009-10-27 15:47:12.305 macruby[61552:903] GrowlApplicationBridge: Error writing registration dictionary at /var/folders/8Z/8ZW9lfcxHlWsi+jWQGSXXk+++TI/-Tmp-/macruby-61552-96CEC625-EEE2-49D3-8532-0184DB93E0F4.growlRegDict: Property list invalid for format