How to gray out an NSMenuItem?

Question

I'm writing an app with Swift targeted to macOS Sierra.

I have an NSMenuItem that I'd like to gray out (so the user can't even select it).

I have set its parent menu AutoEnableItems to FALSE in the Storyboard and verified that it's still false via logging in my code.

When I set the isEnabled property of my NSMenuItem to false, what it does is that my action associated with the menu item isn't called (which is good) when I select that menu item, but the menu remains selectable.

What I'd like is for it to be grayed out, and obviously not selectable by the user.

Answer 1

Based on the documentation, what you're doing does sound correct.

However, the way I do it is to implement validateMenuItem in my AppDelegate class. This method is a little bit annoying because it gets called for every menu item, with the menu item being passed as a parameter. So you have to switch on the parameter, see if it's the menu item you want to disable, and return false.

There's an Objective-C example here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/nsobject/1518160-validatemenuitem

A Swift example might look like:

override func validateMenuItem(_ menuItem: NSMenuItem) -> Bool {       
    switch menuItem.tag {
    case MenuItemTags.SignOut:
        return signOutEnabled()
    case MenuItemTags.CheckForUpdates:
        return updatesEnabled()
    default:
        return true
    }
}

You may have read this already, but lots of gory details here: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/MenuList/Articles/EnablingMenuItems.html

However, as I said, this article would seem to indicate what you're trying is correct, so who knows? I can say for sure my way works.