Vincent Gable’s Blog

NOTE: Although this specific Bug Bite is about NSTextView, and the “hidden” property, the same underlying issue applies to other interface-objects (NSTableView, etc.), and different properties, like size.

Problem

If you send a setHidden:YES message to an NSTextView, and it’s text disappears, but the view itself (white box) stays visible here’s the problem, and the solution.

It turns out that if you created the NSTextView by dragging it off the pallet in Interface Builder, then it’s not an NSTextView. It’s an NSTextView wrapped inside an NSClipView inside an NSScrollView. The NSScrollView is what puts up the scroll-bars if the NSTextView gets really big; the NSClipView helps make the scrolling work.

So if text is your IBOutlet to your NSTextView, then when you say [text setHidden:YES];, the NSTextView is hidden, but the the total package won’t disappear, unless you hide the NSScrollView as well.

Solutions

You can send the message to NSScrollView containing text, like so:
   [[text enclosingScrollView] setHidden:YES];.
This will hide everything inside the NSScrollView, including text.

Another solution is to create just an NSTextView in Interface Builder. To do this, put an NSView in your interface (it’s called a “Custom View”,in the Interface Builder objects pallet). Then select it, bring up the object inspector (cmd-shift-i), choose the “custom class” from the category menu at the top, and select NSTextView from the list of subclasses. This puts an NSTextView in your interface, without the surrounding clip and scroll views. Unfortunately, it also means you can’t configure it in Interface Builder, beyond resizing it. That’s why I’m not partial to this approach, although I have used it.

Thanks to ZachR for suggesting enclosingScrollView.