ABOUT THE CODE -------------- WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A TEMPLATE EDITOR IS OPENED FOR A RESOURCE The template editor uses a dedicated class for each field type (or family of field types). These classes are all subclasses of the common base class NuTemplateElement. For things like lists, there is a subclass NuTemplateGroupElement from which you can instead subclass to have some of the work done for you. When opening a resource, the template editor first creates a NuTemplateStream for the template resource and calls readOneObject: on it until it runs out of data, instantiating a hierarchy of NuTemplateElement subclasses for based on the template. After that, it creates a NuTemplateStream for the resource and loops over the template object hierarchy, creating a copy of each item, and then calling readDataFrom:containingArray: on the copy, which in turn reads data from the NuTemplateStream and stores it in its instance variables. For this to work, subclasses of NuTemplateElement *must* implement the NSCopying protocol. This results in an object hierarchy that describes the entire resource using template fields containing the data, which can now be edited, displayed in lists, etc. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE TEMPLATE EDITOR IS CLOSED As soon as the template editor is closed, another NuTemplateStream is created for the resource and passed to all template fields (the copies with the resource data, not the pre-parsed template hierarchy), via writeDataTo:, which is where they should write their data to the stream. Before that, sizeOnDisk is called on each NuTemplateElement to calculate the new size of the resource before the actual process of writing them out. This size must include the size of all of their sub-items, and writeDataTo: must call these sub items if they are to be written to disk. SPECIAL CASE: LISTS