I love Categories

24 Aug 2010

One thing I really love about Objective-C is Categories.

What are they?

Categories make it possible to add a method to a class without subclassing.

For example:

Let’s assume that you want to create a method isEmpty. And you want to find a clean way to ask the NSString instance for it.

Then we’ll create a category on the NSString class in which we define a method isEmpty that returns a BOOL value.

How to create them?

Create a header (NSString+UtilityMethods.h) and an implementation file (NSString+UtilityMethods.m).

You define the category and the method in the header file like this:

@interface NSString (UtilityMethods)
- (BOOL)isEmpty;
@end

And in the implementation file like this:

@implementation NSString (UtilityMethods)
- (BOOL)isEmpty {
  return [self count] == 0;
}
@end

Now you can use the isEmpty method on every instance of NSString. (Don’t forget to include the NSString+UtilityMethods.h file)

NSString *text  = @"";
if ([text isEmpty]) {
  text = @"Categories are awesome";
}
NSLog(text);

The above snippet will print out “Categories are awesome”.

Another example with UIColor

This is how I clean up my code with categories. I create a category on UIColor to add methods that return every different UIColor used in my application. This way I only have to modify the colors here in orde to change them in the app.

Header file:

@interface UIColor (ApplicationColors)
+ (UIColor *)backgroundColor;
+ (UIColor *)textColor;
@end

Implementation file:

@implementation UIColor (ApplicationColors)
+ (UIColor *)backgroundColor {
  return [UIColor redColor];
}
+ (UIColor *)textColor {
  return [UIColor whiteColor];
}
@end