Objective C Runtime

We will discuss how Objective C runtime system works and how we can find information about the objects at the runtime. The language always behave differently compile time and runtime. 

Objective C Runtimes

Objective C have two versions of the runtime "modern" and "legacy". The modern version comes with version 2.0 of the language. 

Difference among both the versions is that with the modern runtime if you change the layout of a class than you do not have to recompile the classes that inherit from it.

Messaging in Objective C

In Objective C we know that objects send messages. If you do not know about it you can refer to the one of the previous blogs Object Model of Objective C. 

Now the messages are not bound to the method implementation until runtime. So how does this binding happens at runtime? There is no magic here is the messaging function which does this at runtime "objc_msgSend". This function takes the receiver and the name of the method - this is the method selector name as argument,

ViewController LifeCycle

We had previously discussed ViewController in the topic Introduction to the ViewControllers in iOS and in that topic we had given an overview of the ViewController LifeCycle.

Today we are going to discuss only the ViewController LifeCycle and How we should use each of the methods provided in the lifecycle event.

What is LifeCycle?

A lifecycle is an event which has certain steps from the point of creation to deletion. So how do we know about the steps during this period? A Sequence of methods is called as they progress through the LifeCycle. 

Now we may need to perform a different kind of actions at different steps of the life cycle and thus we commonly override these methods and perform these actions.

Introduction to Introspection in Objective C

This article is intended for understanding of the beginners. You will not see any advance stuff here. I will be giving some basic introduction to Introspection and what are the syntaxes to perform the Introspection.

We may have an array of objects of different kind of classes. But we might need to be sure of the type of object before sending a message to the object. So How do we do this? We use introspection.

Introduction to NSAttributedString and NSMutableAttributedString Class

NSAttributedString

This is new in iOS 6. It is really powerful and really useful. Think of NSAttributedString as an NString where each character has dictionary of attributes. The attributes attached to the character can be its font, the color, is it underline etc etc. Thats how you can think of NSAttributedString as conceptually.

However its not like that It is very efficient and it handles the attributes very efficiently. You will know as we progress through the article.

Syntax

How to we get the attributes from the NSAttributed string. here is the syntax.

-(NSDictionary *)attributesAtIndex : (NSUInteger) index effectiveRange : (NSRangePointer) range;