Cocoa Programming for OS X: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

Container View Controllers

Master/detail is a very common user interface idiom. The interface is split in two: a list of items to select from on the left (master) and a view for the selected item on the right (detail). You can see this in many apps. In Xcode the navigator is the master view and the editor is the detail view.

Common interface arrangements are an excellent opportunity for reusable software components, and Cocoa provides a container view controller, NSSplitViewController, to aid in building master/detail interfaces.

Container view controllers, themselves NSViewController subclasses, manage the display of a collection of child view controllers. How they display their children depends upon the nature of the specific ...