How does Apple update the Airport menu while it is open? (How to change NSMenu when it is already open)

Question

I've got a statusbar item that pops open an NSMenu, and I have a delegate set and it's hooked up correctly (-(void)menuNeedsUpdate:(NSMenu *)menu works fine). That said, that method is setup to be called before the menu is displayed, I need to listen for that and trigger an asynchronous request, later updating the menu while it is open, and I can't figure out how that's supposed to be done.

Thanks :)

EDIT

Ok, I'm now here:

When you click on the menu item (in the status bar), a selector is called that runs an NSTask. I use the notification center to listen for when that task is finished, and write:

[[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] performSelector:@selector(updateTheMenu:) target:self argument:statusBarMenu order:0 modes:[NSArray arrayWithObject:NSEventTrackingRunLoopMode]];

and have:

- (void)updateTheMenu:(NSMenu*)menu {
    NSMenuItem *mitm = [[NSMenuItem alloc] init];
    [mitm setEnabled:NO];
    [mitm setTitle:@"Bananas"];
    [mitm setIndentationLevel:2];
    [menu insertItem:mitm atIndex:2];
    [mitm release];
}

This method is definitely called because if I click out of the menu and immediately back onto it, I get an updated menu with this information in it. The problem is that it's not updating -while the menu is open-.

Answer 1

The problem here is that you need your callback to get triggered even in menu tracking mode.

For example, -[NSTask waitUntilExit] "polls the current run loop using NSDefaultRunLoopMode until the task completes". This means that it won't get run until after the menu closes. At that point, scheduling updateTheMenu to run on NSCommonRunLoopMode doesn't help—it can't go back in time, after all. I believe that NSNotificationCenter observers also only trigger in NSDefaultRunLoopMode.

If you can find some way to schedule a callback that gets run even in the menu tracking mode, you're set; you can just call updateTheMenu directly from that callback.

- (void)updateTheMenu {
  static BOOL flip = NO;
  NSMenu *filemenu = [[[NSApp mainMenu] itemAtIndex:1] submenu];
  if (flip) {
    [filemenu removeItemAtIndex:[filemenu numberOfItems] - 1];
  } else {
    [filemenu addItemWithTitle:@"Now you see me" action:nil keyEquivalent:@""];
  }
  flip = !flip;
}

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification *)aNotification {
  NSTimer *timer = [NSTimer timerWithTimeInterval:0.5
                                           target:self
                                         selector:@selector(updateTheMenu)
                                         userInfo:nil
                                          repeats:YES];
  [[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] addTimer:timer forMode:NSRunLoopCommonModes];
}

Run this and hold down the File menu, and you'll see the extra menu item appears and disappears every half second. Obviously "every half second" isn't what you're looking for, and NSTimer doesn't understand "when my background task is finished". But there may be some equally simple mechanism that you can use.

If not, you can build it yourself out of one of the NSPort subclasses—e.g., create an NSMessagePort and have your NSTask write to that when it's done.

The only case you're really going to need to explicitly schedule updateTheMenu the way Rob Keniger described above is if you're trying to call it from outside of the run loop. For example, you could spawn a thread that fires off a child process and calls waitpid (which blocks until the process is done), then that thread would have to call performSelector:target:argument:order:modes: instead of calling updateTheMenu directly.