Laggy interface with NSSearchField hooked up to an NSArrayController via bindings

Posted by Simone Manganelli on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Simone Manganelli
Published on 2010-05-30T21:36:30Z Indexed on 2010/05/30 21:42 UTC
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So I've got an NSSearchField hooked up directly to an NSArrayController via bindings, attached to the filterPredicate, so that without any code, the user can just type in the NSSearchField and filter the list of objects in the NSArrayController presented to him in the interface (an NSCollectionView, to be specific).

The NSSearchField is hooked up to provide live searching, so that the NSCollectionView is filtered instantly as the user types, not after waiting for a short period for the user to stop typing.

However, the problem is that this makes the interface really laggy. Typing is delayed significantly, by 0.5-1 seconds, and it seems like the NSCollectionView is trying to animate each and every rearrangement of items for each portion of the search string that the user enters.

What I'd like is for the searching to be live, but the typing in the search field to be fluid, and the results to filter as fast as possible. Is there a way to do this via bindings, or will I need to put in some custom code that triggers the filterPredicate on a separate thread?

(Note that I've got a custom sorting algorithm set up on the NSArrayController, and removing it seems to help a bit with the laggyness, but not completely.)

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