I just wasted ~2 hours debugging a problem that was the result of my “IBOutlet NSTableView *profileTableView” not being wired up in Interface Builder.

When IB knows about an outlet or action that isn’t wired up, the icon in the instances tab gets an exclamation point in its lower left hand corner. This is a great feature. However, knowing that I hadn’t yet wired everything up I was fine with my controller having the exclamation point. Little did I know I actually forget to wire up an outlet I was trying to use. Ugh. So the lesson for today was “look at what’s not wired up, and if you can, just wire them all up to stubs so the exclamation point carries the meaning it deserves”.

To prevent this in the future, I’d like to be able to run in a debug mode where I get an NSLog(@”BOZO!”) every time a message was sent to nil. Is that wrong / unreasonable? Does this mode already exist and is easy to attain?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 7:24 am and is filed under Cocoa, Code, Commentary, Interface Builder, Xcode. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.