Even Easier Notification Sending with Notification Protocols in Objective-C

Having revisited Notification Protocols in order to ensure they work with Swift, I had another look at how to make them even more natural in Objective-C.

Fortunately, I found a way:

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[@protocol(ModelDidChange) notify:@"Payload"];

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This will send the ModelDidChange notification with the object parameter @"Payload". Note that the compiler will check that there is a Protocol called ModelDidChange and the runtime will verify that it is an actual notification protocol, raising an exception if that is not true. You can also omit the parameter:

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[@protocol(ModelDidChange) notify];

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In both cases, the amount of boilerplate or semantic noise is minimised, whereas the core of what is happening is put at the forefront. Compare this to the traditional way:

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[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@"ModelDidChange" object:@"Payload"]

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Here, almost the entire expression is noise, with the relevant pieces being buried near the end of the expression as parameters. No checking is (or can be) performed to ensure that the argument string actually refers to a notification name.

Of course, you can replace that literal string with a string constant, but that constant is also not checked, and since it lives in a global namespace with all other identifiers, it needs quite a bit of prefixing to disambiguate:

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[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:WLCoreNotificationModelDidChange object:@"Payload"]

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Would it be easy to spot that this was supposed to be WLCoreNotificationModelWasDeleted?

The Macro PROTOCOL_NOTIFY() is removed, whereas the sendProtocolNotification() function is retained for Swift compatibility.

Notification Protocols from Swift

When I introduced Notification Protocols, I mentioned that they should be Usable from Swift.

This is code from a sample Swift Playground that shows how to do this. The Playground needs to have access to MPWFoundation, for example by being inside a Xcode workspace that includes it.

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import Foundation
import MPWFoundation

@objc protocol ModelDidChange:MPWNotificationProtocol {
    func modelDidChange( payload:NSNotification );
}

class MyView : NSObject,ModelDidChange {
    override public init() {
        super.init()
        self.installProtocolNotifications()
    }
    func modelDidChange( payload:NSNotification ) {
        print("I was notified, self: \(self) payload: \"\(payload.object!)\"")
    }
}

let target1 = MyView()
let target2 = MyView()

sendProtocolNotification( ModelDidChange.self , "The Payload")

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A brief walkthrough:

1. We declare a ModelDidChange notification protocol.
2. We indicate that it is a notification protocol by adopting MPWNotificationProtocol.
3. The notification protocol has the message modelDidChange
4. We declare that MyView conforms to ModelDidChange. This means we declaratively indicate that we receive ModelDidChange notifications, which will result in MyView instance being sent modelDidChange() messages.
5. It also means that we have to implement modelDidChange(), which will be checked by the compiler.
6. We need to call installProtocolNotifications() in order to activate the declared relationships.
7. We use sendProtocolNotification() with the Protocol object as the argument and a payload.
8. The fact that we need a protocol object instead of any old String gives us additional checking.

Enjoy!