View-based NSOutlineView without NIB?

NSOutlineView is a subclass of NSTableView. And currently, NSTableView supports two implementations.

• Cell-based.
• View-based.

To make OSX 10.8 Finder style side bar (with automatic gray Icon styling), need to use view-based table view with source-list highlight style.

With NIBs, this is typical job. Nothing hard. (see SidebarDemo) But I want to avoid any NIBs or Interface Builder. I want make the side bar purely programmatically.

In this case, I have big problem. AFAIK, there's no way to supply prototype view for specific cell. When I open .xib file, I see <tableColumn> is containing <prototypeCellViews>. And this specifies what view will be used for the column. I can't find how to set this programmatically using public API.

As a workaround, I tried to make cell manually using -[NSTableView makeViewWithIdentifier:owner:] and -[NSTableView viewAtColumn:row:makeIfNecessary:], but none of them returns view instance. I created a NSTableCellView, but it doesn't have image-view and text-field instances. And I also tried to set them, but the fields are marked as assign so the instances deallocated immediately. I tried to keep it by forcing retaining them, but it doesn't work. NSTableView doesn't manage them, so I am sure that table view don't like my implementation.

I believe there's a property to set this prototype-view for a column. But I can't find them. Where can I find the property and make system-default NSOutlineView with source-list style programmatically?

If you follow the example in SidebarDemo, they use a subclass of NSTableCellView for the detail rows. In order to emulate the InterfaceBuilder mojo, you can hook everything together in the constructor. The rest is the same as the demo (see outlineView:viewForTableColumn:item:).

@interface SCTableCellView : NSTableCellView
@end

@implementation SCTableCellView

- (id)initWithFrame:(NSRect)frameRect {
  self = [super initWithFrame:frameRect];
  [self setAutoresizingMask:NSViewWidthSizable];
  NSImageView* iv = [[NSImageView alloc] initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(0, 6, 16, 16)];
  NSTextField* tf = [[NSTextField alloc] initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(21, 6, 200, 14)];
  NSButton* btn = [[NSButton alloc] initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(0, 3, 16, 16)];
  [iv setImageScaling:NSImageScaleProportionallyUpOrDown];
  [iv setImageAlignment:NSImageAlignCenter];
  [tf setBordered:NO];
  [tf setDrawsBackground:NO];
  [[btn cell] setControlSize:NSSmallControlSize];
  [[btn cell] setBezelStyle:NSInlineBezelStyle];
  [[btn cell] setButtonType:NSMomentaryPushInButton];
  [[btn cell] setFont:[NSFont boldSystemFontOfSize:10]];
  [[btn cell] setAlignment:NSCenterTextAlignment];
  [self setImageView:iv];
  [self setTextField:tf];
  [self addSubview:iv];
  [self addSubview:tf];
  [self addSubview:btn];
  return self;
}

- (NSButton*)button {
  return [[self subviews] objectAtIndex:2];
}

- (void)viewWillDraw {
  [super viewWillDraw];
  NSButton* btn = [self button];
  ...