Same place as usual. I really hope this will be stable for some time, at least until after WWDC…

An interesting thing happened while doing this version. (The following discussion will make no sense unless you’re familiar with RBSplitView.)

I have an adjustSubviews method call which does all the heavy lifting, computing the new positions and sizes for all subviews. This worked fine until I saw the need to (sometimes) have a specific subview stay the same size whenever the window was resized. In other words, I needed an adjustSubviewsExcepting: method.

At first I saw no easy way to do this, but then I hit upon a simple trick; I would temporarily set that subview’s minimum and maximum dimensions to the current dimension, call adjustSubviews, then put the original limits back. This was way back in version 1.0.2.

All seemed to work fine until I received a bug report that this could cause the subview to be collapsed in certain circumstances. So this time I tried several ways to prevent this from happening; the code inside adjustSubviewsExcepting: grew ever more large and cumbersome, and nothing appeared to work in all cases.

Then the solution appeared in my sleep (as often happens). The thing was to make adjustSubviewsExcepting: the general case, and adjustSubviews the exception! I already looped twice over the subviews; first, to try to accomodate them just by resizing and limiting some to their constraints, then again if that didn’t work, to collapse or expand some until all constraints were satisfied.

So I added a few lines to double this double loop; once while holding the excepted subview constant (if there was any), then once again while allowing it to resize if a solution was not reached. This proved to work quite well, and I was already near to publishing until I again found a circumstance where it didn’t work.

Turned out my initial implementation was faulty in that 3 passes (not 2!) were needed to find a viable solution. So the algorithm now loops 3 times if there is no excepted subview and 6 if there isn’t. By now, after refactoring the inner loop several times, no serious speed penalty is incurred and everything works much more smoothly.

Moral: refactoring should also consider what is the rule and what the exception…