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Method Selectors

Cocoa makes extensive use of the target-action design paradigm. This allows you to have one object send an arbitrary message (the action) to an arbitrary object (the target) in response to an event, such as a button being pressed or a notification being posted. The Objective-C language provides support for this paradigm by allowing any message to be sent to any object, without needing to know the class of the object first. The message is specified by the Objective-C type SEL (also called a selector), usually obtained with the @selector() directive. (See “Selectors” in The Objective-C Programming Language for a more detailed discussion.)

Java, however, is a strongly-typed language wherein you must know the class of an object before sending it a message. To bring target-action support to Java, Cocoa implements the NSSelector class. An NSSelector object specifies a method signature, which is a method’s name and parameter list. You can later apply a selector on any object, and it performs the method that matches the selector, if there is one.

NSSelector is similar to java.lang.reflect.Method, which fully specifies a particular class’s implementation of a method, but you can apply it only to objects of that class. NSSelector does not specify the method’s class, so you can apply it to an object of any class. To find the java.lang.reflect.Method object for a method that matches an NSSelector object and that is in a particular object or class, use the NSSelector instance method methodOnObject or methodOnClass.

See “Using NSSelector” for examples of how you use the NSSelector class.

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