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When you look into AppKit’s document architecture, you’ll see that although a document may be represented with more than one windows, the inverse is not true. There is only a setDocument: method in NSWindowController which implies that a window can only handle one document.

BSMultipleDocumentsWindowController extends the document architecture to allow for one window to represent multiple documents. This allows for tabbed window interface. A window can now hold one or more tabs. Each showing a document. Closing a document removes the tab. Closing the window closes all documents.

This code was developped for HoudahSpot 4.0. HoudahSpot is a file search tool that is built upon Spotlight. It uses the Core Data document architecture to manage multiple windows and persist searches. HoudahSpot 4.0 added tabbed windows.

In HoudahSpot the BSMultipleDocumentsWindowController is paired with a MMTabBarView. This implements a tab bar that closely matches the ones seen in Finder, Safari, or Xcode.

The seed for this project comes from a blog post by Sasmito Adibowo: One NSWindow handling multiple NSDocument instances.

• Document subclasses override makeWindowControllers to post a notification rather than create a window for the document
• Document subclasses implement makeViewController to provide a view rather than a window
• A notification handler takes care of creating the window to host document views
• BSMultipleDocumentsWindowController manages the list of documents and document view controllers
• BSMultipleDocumentsWindowController tracks the selected document
• NSWindowController is attached to the selected document and shows title, dirty state, etc.
• BSMultipleDocumentsWindow makes sure that the Close menu item closes a single tab and that the Close button closes all tabs
• BSMultipleDocumentsWindowController checks documents for changes before closing tabs

Follow the lead of the sample application.

1. Copy the BS*.h and BS*.m files to your project
2. Make your document class a subclass of either BSDocument or BSPersistentDocument
3. Create a view controller conforming to the BSDocumentViewController protocol
4. Make your document class conform to the BSMultipleDocumentsDocument protocol
5. Make your window controller a subclass of BSMultipleDocumentsWindowController
6. Make your window an instance of BSMultipleDocumentsWindow
7. Override -[NSDocument makeWindowController] to post a BSDocumentNeedsWindowNotificationName notification
8. Instanatiate BSDocumentController in the application's main nib or in your application delegate's applicationWillFinishLaunching: method
9. Handle BSDocumentNeedsWindowNotificationName in your application delegate
10. Set up menu items for creating and closing windows and tabs
11. Provide UI to host the document view controllers. The sample application uses a NSTabView managed by a DocumentsContainerViewController

Copyright (c) 2012 Sasmito Adibowo. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Copyright (c) 2014-2015 Houdah Software s.à r.l. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.