Instead of looping through the contents of the nib, the key are IBOutlets. Create a NSView IBOutlet in your controller class were you’ll want to use the view. Next step is to open your nib file which contains your external view and change the File Owner’s class identity to the controller class you’ve just extended with the IBOutlet for the view. Now just ctrl-drag from the File Owner to your view and select your desired IBOutlet from the list.

Now you’ve connected your controller and the external view, yet the IBOutlet will not be hooked up automatically when your controller’s created. This is a good thing because we can postpone loading the extra nib to when it’s really necessary saving resources for other, more important stuff. This is a practice Apple encourages, using multiple nib files and loading them dynamically when needed.

This is the code needed to load the nib, it’ll automaticall hook up your controller’s IBOutlet to your view.

[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"YourNibName" owner:self options:nil];

Simple? Indeed, yet it took me a while to realize using an external nib is basically just the same as putting all your views in a single nib container. It’s all based on hooking up IBOutlets.