[Pythonmac-SIG] Dock menu

[Dethe Elza]

On 1-Mar-07, at 5:36 AM, Amrit Jassal wrote:

> I have a static dock menu created with Interface Builder (cocoa).  
> Works great.
> I now have a requirement to add/remove items for this menu at run- 
> time or enable/disable menu items at run-time.
>
> I cannot find a way to get a handle to the dock menu at run-time to  
> get at the menu items that I want to enable/disable. Can I somehow  
> get a reference to menu objects (NSMenu) at run-time?

Sure, there are several ways.  Your menu should already be hooked up  
to the NSApplication outlet dockMenu in Interface Builder.  In theory  
you should be able to get a reference using NSApp().dockMenu(), but  
that doesn't appear to work.  You could subclass NSApplication to add  
another outlet that behaves normally and gives you access to the  
menu.  You could probably extract the menu from the Nib file, but  
that's beyond what I can explain in an email.

> Or I cannot wire up the menu using IB and need to create the menu  
> at run-time myself?

That's certainly an option.  I'm not sure why the dockMenu outlet is  
not exposed in the API.  There is an (undocumented) NSApp 
().setDockMenu_(my_menu) call in AppKit, but no  
corresponding .dockMenu() unfortunately.  You can either use the  
setDockMenu, or if your application delegate returns a menu from  
applicationDockMenu_(application) that menu will be used, over-riding  
any menu set in Interface Builder.

HTH

--Dethe
You need to lay out the user interface components visually, by hand,  
with total control over where they go. Automated LayoutManagers don’t  
cut it. A corollary of this is that you can’t move a UI layout from  
one platform to another and have the computer make everything fit.  
Computers don’t lay out interfaces by themselves any better than they  
can translate French to English by themselves. -- Jens Alfke