iPhone tableView

The Table View is widely used in iPhone apps, and ther are many examples of using it on navigation pages in the iPhone SDK example programs.  These examples generally show how to add a tableView that fills the screen, or sometimes with a Navigation  Bar element at the top.

Sometimes, we want to use a table view as a smaller element within another view.  The iPhone Clock app uses this approache in stopwatch mode to show the lap times.

In this case, the view that contains the TableView will typically be a subclass of UIViewController. We need only add the protocols UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource to our view. This is done in the header file:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
 
@interface MyViewController : UIViewController 
  <UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource>{
}
@end

For a simple view, we will need to add the numberOfRowsInSection and cellForRowAtIndex methods. This example shows a table of 5 rows, with cells labeled Item #0 to Item #4.

#import "MyViewController.h"
 
@implementation MyViewController
- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView
  numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section{
     return 5;  // we want 5 rows in our table.
}
 
- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView
     cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath{
 
     NSString *Identifier = [ [NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"Item #%d", 
          [indexPath indexAtPosition:1] ];
 
     UITableViewCell *cell =
          [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:Identifier];
 
     if (cell == nil){
          cell = [ [ [UITableViewCell alloc] 
               initWithFrame:CGRectZero reuseIdentifier: Identifier] 
               autorelease];
	}
 
     cell.text = Identifier;	
     return cell;
}
@end

In interface builder, connect the datasource and delegate outlets from your table view directly to file’s owner. There is no need to add a tableViewController to the nib.