Is it possible to customize @synthesized properties?
- by Dan K.
I'm probably just being a bit lazy here, but bear with me.  Here's my situation.  I have a class with two nonatomic, retained properties.  Let's say:
@property (nonatomic, retain) UITextField *dateField;
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSDate *date;
I synthesize them as expected in the implementation.  What I want to happen is that whenever the setter on date is invoked, it also does something to the dateField (i.e. it sets the text property on the dateField to be a nicely formatted version of the date).
I realize I can just manually override the setter for date in my implementation by doing the following:
- (void) setDate:(NSDate *)newDate {
    if (date != newDate) {
        [date release];
        date = [newDate retain];
        // my code to touch the dateField goes here
    }
}
What would be awesome is if I could let Objective C handle the retain/release cycle, but still be able to "register" (for lack of a better term) a custom handler that would be invoked after the retain/release/set happens.  My guess is that isn't possible.  My google-fu didn't come up with any answer to this, though, so I thought I'd ask.