Adding rows to UITableView built from Storyboard

Question

I have a static UITableView built from a Storyboard that works well. I want to fill the first category programmatically, though, from a user-defined file

Simply put, I want to go through all the strings in an array and add them as cells for the rows of the first category. For the second category, I have a series of mildly complex cells (containing a number of labels, textfields, buttons and other controls), defined in the storyboard, that I don't feel like recreating in code.

As far as I understand, the default behaviour for a UITableView built from a storyboard is to use the nib file as an implicit datasource. If I use a custom class as datasource, my second section doesn't work. I have thought of two possible ways to fix this:

• Fill my first category from the datasource and delegate the rest to the nib file. Is this possible? Is there some method to programmatically ask the nib to fill my UITableView?
• Export my storyboard-built cells into code and paste this code into my datasource. This method has the disadvantage of making my second category harder to modify.

Is one of those two options feasible? Is there another option?

Answer 1

There are two kinds of table views when you use Storyboards:

• Static
• Dynamic

You're currently using the former. You define everything in the Storyboard and have very little code.

But you need to change to the latter.

You can still keep your UITableViewCells in the Storyboard; there's no need to do that in code (though you can if it makes things easier). You can refer to the template cells using the "reuse identifer."

Otherwise you've pretty much got it. You'll need to write code to implement the data source and (possibly) more methods of the table view delegate.

It's kind of fiddly switching from static to dynamic. I keep meaning to raise a Radar because I'm sure Xcode could be making it easier to do...

Answer 2

I would use dynamic prototype cells. Then, I would set up the ViewController as the delegate and the dataSource. I would then create a custom subclass of UITableViewCell and connect the elements of the second section to IBOutlets in the custom UITableViewCell.

If the first section wasn't something that could be done with one of the generic cell types, I would also create a custom subclass of UITableViewCell for that section as well.

I would then use the cellForRowAtIndexPath: method to set up the cells with the information that I want in them. So if my first section used FirstSectionCell and my second section used SecondSectionCell as custom subclasses of UITableViewCell my cellForRowAtIndexPath: would look like this:

-(UITableViewCell *) tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{

    if(indexPath.section==0)
    {
        FirstSectionCell *firstCell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"First Cell Prototype"];

        //Set up the first cell.

        return firstCell;
    } 
    else if(indexPath.section ==1)
    {
        SecondSectionCell *secondCell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"Second Cell Ptototype"];

        //Set up second cell.
        secondCell.someLabel.text = @"whatever";
        //etc.

        return secondCell;
    }
    else 
    {
        //if you have another section handle it here.
    }
}