How to compare the trackingArea of NSEvent to see which trackingArea triggered the "theEvent"

Question

So, I have this mouseEntered event that will make visible a label if I mouse enter a trackingArea. But, depending on which trackingArea was entered I want to set a custom String to the label.

The main question is: How do I get which trackingArea was entered.

This is my code:

-(void)mouseEntered:(NSEvent *)theEvent
{
   if([theEvent trackingArea] isEqual: -- to my trackingArea --)
   {
       [self.label setStringValue:@"Test"];
   }
}

Answer 1

Sounds like the beginning of Spaghetti code to me..

I.e.: Checking in one view whether something was triggered by another view - I suppose you're attempting to implement some kind of online help system with some text to be displayed for various views/controls. In that case you might easily end up with a huge if-then-else block and dozens of views to check.

In any case I'd suggest to use a different approach and embrace loose coupling in your code:

How about having the view that actually owns the tracking area send a notification with the string it wants somebody else to display?

That way views don't need to know each other, no instance variables to set up to point to each other, etc. - just a notification somebody sends and somebody else will listen to.

Clean, maintainable, easily extensible.