Apple WebObjects 3.5 - Manual (Page 101)

Intercomponent Communication
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invoked by the child. In this example parentAction identifies the parent
method named "respondToAlert" , as specified in the parent’s declarations file.
Note: You must enclose the name of the parent’s action method in quotes.
Now, looking at the rejectChoice and acceptChoice method implementations, you
can see that they are identical except for the assignment to exitStatus . Note
that after a value is assigned to exitStatus , the child component sends a
message to itself to invoke the parent’s action method, causing the parent’s
respondToAlert method to be invoked. Since the parent’s usersChoice variable is
bound to the value of the child’s exitStatus variable, the parent code can
determine which of the two links was clicked and respond accordingly.
Figure 30 illustrates the connections between the child and parent
components.
Figure 30. Parent and Child Component Interconnections
The child component’s parentAction attribute provides a separation between a
user action (such as clicking a hyperlink) within a reusable component and
the method it ultimately invokes in the parent. Because of this separation,
the same child component can be used by multiple parents, invoking
different methods in each of them: