What describes the Application Delegate best? How does it fit into the whole concept?

Question

I think to know what the App Delegate does. It has some nice methods like -applicationDidFinishLaunching which will be called when the app has finished launching, and so on. But what's that actually? Is that some object instantiated in the UIApplicationMain function?

And how does it work that every class in my app has access to that App Delegate object? Is there any good graph on the net that visualizes these relationships?

Answer 1

In Cocoa, a delegate is an object that another object defers to on questions of behavior and informs about changes in its state. For instance, a UITableViewDelegate is responsible for answering questions about how the UITableView should behave when selections are made or rows are reordered. It is the object that the UITableView asks when it wants to know how high a particular row should be. In the Model-View-Controller paradigm, delegates are Controllers, and many delegates' names end in "Controller."

At risk of stating the obvious, the UIApplicationDelegate is the delegate for the UIApplication. The relationship is a bit more obvious in Cocoa (Mac) than in Cocoa Touch (iPhone), since the NSApplication delegate is able to control the NSApplication's behavior more directly (preventing the application from terminating for instance). iPhone doesn't permit much control over the UIApplication, so mostly the UIApplicationDelegate is informed of changes rather than having an active decision-making process.

The UIApplicationDelegate isn't strictly available from everywhere in the app. The singleton UIApplication is ([UIApplication sharedApplication]), and through it you can find its delegate. But this does not mean that it's appropriate for every object in an app to talk directly to the app delegate. In general, I discourage developers from having random objects talk to the app delegate. Most problems that are solved that way are better solved through Singletons, NSNotification, or other delegate objects.

As to its creation, on Mac there is nothing magical about the app delegate. It's just an object instantiated and wired by the NIB in most cases. On iPhone, however, the app delegate can be slightly magical if instantiated by UIApplicationMain(). The fourth parameter is an NSString indicating the app delegate's class, and UIApplicationMain() will create one and set it as the delegate of the sharedApplication. This allows you to set the delegate without a NIB (something very difficult on Mac). If the fourth parameter to UIApplicationMain() is nil (as it is in the Apple templates), then the delegate is created and wired by the main NIB, just like the main window.