How to lock parent rows in NSOutlineView populated by NSTreeController

Question

I have an NSOutlineView that is populated from an array via an NSTreeController. I would like to make it so that rows that have children are not editable and popups in those rows are hidden. You can see my outlineview in the attached screenshot – it's essentially a tree of settings.

How can I go about this or do I need to implement the datasource via a delegate instead of using the NSTreeController to do it?

Answer 1

Have you looked into the delegate methods?

Specifically interesting are

– outlineView:shouldEditTableColumn:item:

which allows to determine if an item can be edited. Just check for children, if item is an parent and return NO;

Hiding the popup buttons depends on how you have setup your NSOutlineView. In a cell-based outline view use for example

– outlineView:willDisplayCell:forTableColumn:item:

to hide cell content for parent rows. In a view based outline view another method comes into play to customize certain columns:

– outlineView:viewForTableColumn:item:

This should be easy to use to achieve your results.