List NotificationCenter Observers

May 14, 2017

If you want to find out which observers are currently registered in NotificationCenter, break and print its debug description:

✅(lldb) e print(NotificationCenter.default.debugDescription)
<NSNotificationCenter:0x6000000dc540>
Name, Object, Observer, Options
com.apple.accessibility.SpeakThisEnabled, 0x11088e490, 0x7fcebcc00f10, 1001
com.apple.accessibility.text.legibility.status, 0x11088e490, 0x7fcebcc00f10, 1001
com.apple.accessibility.text.legibility.status, 0x11088e490, 0x608000024220, 1400
UITextEffectsWindowDidRotateNotification, 0x11088e490, 0x7fcebce071a0, 1400
com.apple.accessibility.reduce.motion.status, 0x11088e490, 0x7fcebcc00f10, 1001
UIWindowDidBecomeHiddenNotification, 0x11088e490, 0x60800017be40, 1400
UIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification, 0x11088e490, 0x7fcebcc06c20, 1400
… etc.

As we can see from the column headers, each row contains Name, Object, Observer, Options. Multiple calls to NotificationCenter.default.addObserver with some NSNotification.Name will result in multiple entries in this list—useful to check if a observer hasn’t been added too often!

My solution is based on useyourloaf’s “bonus tip”, that he found in  Foundation Release Notes for OS X v10.11 and iOS 9.

However, when trying his tip in Xcode 8.3.2 (8E2002) on a Swift 3 code base aimed at iOS Deployment Target 8.0, we
• (per default) get a truncated list of the observers, so we need to increase the target.max-string-summary-length, but also
• don’t get line-breaks in the console output, so it’s harder to read.

…as we can see from the following example:

(lldb) p NotificationCenter.default.debugDescription
(String) $R0 = "<NSNotificationCenter:0x6080000caa30>\nName, Object, Observer, Options\ncom.apple.accessibility.SpeakThisEnabled, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9e01240, 1001\ncom.apple.accessibility.text.legibility.status, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9e01240, 1001\ncom.apple.accessibility.text.legibility.status, 0x10f6b0490, 0x600000035e00, 1400\nUITextEffectsWindowDidRotateNotification, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9f0bea0, 1400\ncom.apple.accessibility.reduce.motion.status, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9e01240, 1001\nUIWindowDidBecomeHiddenNotification, 0x10f6b0490, 0x6080001774c0, 1400\nUIDeviceOrientationDidChangeNotification, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9f0e020, 1400\nPBDefaultCoercionRegistryDidInstantiateNotification, 0x10f6b0490, 0x60800005d370, 1400\n_UIApplicationForcedUserInterfaceLayoutDirectionChangedNotification, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9f01960, 1400\n_UIApplicationForcedUserInterfaceLayoutDirectionChangedNotification, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9f01470, 1400\nUITextInputCurrentInputModeDidChangeNotification, 0x10f6b0490, 0x7f92a9f0bea0, 1400\ncom.apple.accessibility.monoaudio."...
(lldb) set set target.max-string-summary-length 50000
(lldb) p NotificationCenter.default.debugDescription
(String) $R1 = <this time the entire list>

Fortunately, I previously found a solution to the line formatting of an Alamofire debugDescription in Xcode console that I could apply here as well.