Edit me

The category is the original plug and play mechanism of Objective-C. With it you can augment existing classes. Here we do a more complicated kind of extension, than what you are likely to encounter when dealing categories.

Extending a class cluster

See Class cluster for an introduction on class clusters.

A class cluster is a class collection of one placeholder class and one or more concrete subclasses. The subclasses are not advertised in headers, but are created by the placeholder and substitute it.

A typical class cluster is NSString, to which we will add a subclass now.

Extend the placeholder class

We will extend NSString to natively carry EBCDIC characters.

It makes technically little sense to do this in a subclass of NSString, but that’s beside the point here.

So we define a category on NSString that advertises a new initializer. The API user will only see this new method, everything else is hidden from plain sight. The user will still deal only with the familiar NSString class:

#import "import.h"


typedef char   EBCDICChar;


@interface NSString( EBCDIC)

- (instancetype) initWithEBCDICCharacters:(EBCDICChar *) characters
                                   length:(NSUInteger) length;
@end

NSString is actually a placeholder class. In the implementation of the category, we instantiate a new EBCDICString and return this. We don’t have to do anything with the placeholder:

#import "NSString+EBCDIC.h"

#import "import-private.h"

#import "EBCDICString.h"  // import this here and not in import-private


@implementation NSString( EBCDIC)

- (instancetype) initWithEBCDICCharacters:(EBCDICChar *) characters
                                   length:(NSUInteger) length
{
   NSParameterAssert( [self __isClassClusterPlaceholderObject]);

   self = [[EBCDICString alloc] initWithEBCDICCharacters:characters
                                                  length:length];
   return( self);
}

@end

Implementing EBCDICString is left as an exercise to the reader…

Next

Now lets configure a class from a category.

Tags: