Issues interacting with NSDatePickerCell in a table view

[pamies]

I’m writing my first ASS application, having heaps of fun playing around with different controls in Interface Builder.

The biggest issue I have is with the NSDatePickerCell class in a table view. I’ve managed to insert the control into one column of the table in IB (the text version of the date picker), I’ve linked a data source to the table view, and have populated the table with data.

Issue is, when I run the app, the stepper element of the date picker only increments or decrements the first portion of the displayed date, and unlike the standard date picker control (i.e. not the DatePickerCell), I can’t seem to select individual portions of the date to type in a new value. In short, the cell version of the control works completely differently to the non-standard version.

Is this normal, or does it sound like something is completely wrong with my app? Is this simply a major shortcoming of the current version of the control?

If this is normal behaviour for the control, can anyone think of a work around to allow VERY simple date editing in a table view? At the moment, the only thing I can think is to open a custom made Date Picker Panel as a sheet every time someone clicks in the date column of the table.

Any better suggestions?

Thanks heaps for your help.

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[Doug.app]

I’m having the same trouble. I searched the BBS for an answer, and checked the docs, but didn’t find anything.

How do I select and adjust the minutes in the UI?

Thanks,
Doug

[pamies]

I’m not using the time function (only date) but this is exactly the issue I’m having. Only the left most text element (in my case the day) is adjusted by the stepper, and there seems to be no way to select the month or year to alter them instead of the day.

Maybe this is an intentional design element, but obviously clicking the stepper 365 times to increments 1 year is a little unreasonable.

Anyone have any ideas?

Peter

[Dominik]

Hi Peter & Doug,

here’s a message regarding this problem found in Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com - it’s a little bit older than a year now but I think things haven’t changed since then:

…
Unfortunately, the NSDatePickerCell class in Tiger is not yet equipped for editing use in table and outline views. There’s some not insignificant generalizing that will need to be done in the field editor mechanism to make this work.

In the meantime, I’d recommend you use the old reliable standby of an NSTextFieldCell with an attached NSDateFormatter if you need to present editable date values in a table or outline view.

Hope this helps,
Troy Stephens
Cocoa frameworks, Apple

D.

[pamies]

Thanks Dominik,

I’ll try creating a date picker sheet to appear when someone clicks into the date field (I need an easily understandable and completely fool-proof method for setting the date, and a date picker is almost certainly it.)

Thanks again,

Peter

[Doug.app]

Thanks Dominik,

The posted solution requires the time to be typed in, so I just used a text cell. That seems so strange to me that the date picker cell is even offered…

I can’t wait for Xcode 3.

Thanks,
Doug