Dispatch an event vs callback

Caroline

I'm a little confused as to when to dispatch an event, and when just to do a direct callback.

It makes sense to me to dispatch events in games, when many objects may be listening, but with UIKit items, such as a button tap, then very likely only that one button is listening. Or if you have a delegate callback from selecting a UITableView row, it would make sense to me to make that a callback rather than dispatching an event.

In Objective C, I would be doing a one function call on pressing a button. I think the NSNotification is the equivalent of dispatching an event, and I try only to use very few in an app, as they are fairly hard to keep track of.

This means that if I were to have a UIButton then I wouldn't have to inherit from GEventDispatcherProxy. Would I? I could just do the onButtonPress function in the plugin, which directly calls a Lua function.

Am I over-thinking this? Does it matter?

OZApps

I guess you have answered that to an extent yourself.

The callback would serve more specific role where as an event would be handled or ignored and can be bubbled to the super/parent if not handled.

The choice of using either is entirely upto you and to the design of the app.

atilim

I agree with OZApps. It's totally a design choice.

For example, it's possible to develop a UIButton class without using GEventDispatcherProxy and then you can add a function like addTarget which accepts a callback function.