Copy NSView in cocoa / objective-c

Question

I can't see any way to copy an NSView and create an identical NSView object. I see google hits about "use an NSData" but I don't understand that.

Answer 1

To straight up "copy" an NSView, the view has to implement the NSCopying protocol. Unfortunately, NSView does not.

Fortunately, it does implement the NSCoding protocol, which means we can still duplicate a view like:

NSData * archivedView = [NSKeyedArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:myView];
NSView * myViewCopy = [NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:archivedView];

And voilá! You now have a duplicate of myView.

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Edit: (Swift version)

let archivedView = NSKeyedArchiver.archivedData(withRootObject: myView)
let myViewCopy = NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObject(with: archivedView)

(archivedView is of type Data, not NSData)