I'm sorry that I don't post any code in this questions; I'm relatively new to programming and I'm already failing on how to realize my idea.
What I want to create is an app, where
the onboarding screen is an editable table view with custom table view cells
when selecting one of the cells, another (!) editable table view is opened.
That means that every time when adding a row to the main table view, another table view is created in addition to the existing one, that I can access through tapping on my table view cell. Of course, the main table view and the created table view should both be saved and still be there when restarting the app.
I don't want code, I just want some specific advice from some more advanced programmers on how to make this.
Thank you!
For a grid layout, you'll want to use UICollectionView, not UITableView. Here's the UICollectionView documentation.
As for showing another table view on tap: simply use a UIViewController subclass (or maybe a UITableViewController if you're sure you want to use a table view) to present another view. You'll probably want to use this in conjunction with a UINavigationController. I recommend reading the documentation for UINavigationController to understand this pattern better.
Apple's docs are pretty great; go use them! Familiarize yourself with the view controller scheme on iOS and a big chunk of the work in learning will take care of itself. Good luck!
Related
I am trying to create an app for iOS using Swift but running into problems with the very basics.
To keep it simple I just want the app to initially be a single view application with a button and some sort of list view on the page. I believe a TableView is what is recommended here. When I click the button, I just want it to populate the list/table view with some entries, that's it. To start with, I don't care if these entries are hard-coded, I just want to get something working.
I have been looking at different samples but I am getting confused. Some of them seem to suggest using a TableViewController others don't. When I use a tableview controller, the UI I had created seems to get completely replaced with just an empty tableview list and the button is gone.
I previously have developed apps in Windows phone and found it a lot easier. I'd just add a listview object and in the click method of button, add the items programmatically etc. But this is my first time trying to create an iOS app and it seems a lot more confusing. There are delegates, controllers, views all seemingly needed in order to do something very simple.
Can anyone give me some basic step by step instructions about how to add a tableview to an application and load some data into it through a button click?
Make sure you are clear about the difference between a view and a view controller.
iOS uses the MVC design pattern (Model View Controller).
A view object displays contents to the user and responds to user interaction.
A model object stores state data.
A controller object drives the app logic and mediates between the model and the view.
A UITableViewController is a special subclass of a UIViewController who's job is to manage a table view. It has some extra support in it that makes it a good choice for managing a table view, BUT... there is one annoying thing about it. It is designed so the ONLY view it can manage is a table view. You can't use a UITableViewController if you want to add buttons, labels, and other UI elements to your screen outside of the table view.
What I usually do is to create a create a table view controller, create a separate regular view controller, add a container view to the regular view controller, and then use an embed segue to embed the table view controller inside the view controller. (you just control-drag from the container view to the table view controller.) That way you get the best of both worlds. You may want to create a protocol that the table view controller would use to communicate with it's parent view controller.
You should be able to find a tutorial online on setting up a table view controller as a child of another view controller using container views and embed segues. It's quite easy.
I am building a small application for basketball teams.
Each team has a logo and a list of players.
I want to build a view controller for each team.
What is the best practice for that considering the logo and the table view?
What I have thought
I've thought that I should use a UITableViewControler, but I wouldn't be able to insert the image. In other words, I could insert it at the first cell but I don't thing it is the best practice.
Edit
I also thought to use a tableView with two cell identifiers.
Could you help me please?
I appreciate your time and efforts.
Regards,
UITableView has a tableHeaderView and a tableFooterView. These are displayed above and below your table respectively. They are not to be confused with section headers and footers.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/uikit/reference/UITableView_Class/Reference/Reference.html
Chris' answer is probably the best answer for this case because all you need is a view at the top of your table view. If you needed something more complex, you could create a regular UITableViewController, add a container view to it, and control-drag from the container view to a UITableViewController scene in your storyboard. This would creat an "embed segue", and turn the table view controller into a child view controller. that would let you do things like place more than one UITableViewController on a window, add multiple buttons/labels on the top/sides, or whatever.
I have seen questions asked about mutliple UITableViews in one view but they all have only one table visible at a time. I am after something different please.
In my head I want four UITableViews visible in one UIScrollView inside one UIView. The four tables will be visible and populated at once. They will have a dynamic number of rows each so the scroll view will allow users to scroll off of the page to see rows that do not fit.
The tables would be two side by side and then below them the next two side by side so that you end up with a 2x2 square.
I can (sort of) wrap my head around how to code this in the controllers etc. but I cannot figure out how to organise the hierarchi. I have tried using the storeboard to layout the tables inside the view but 9 out of 10 attempts to drop controls in fail as I am obviously not fully understanding this.
Do I need to generate the UITableViews in the UIViews implementation file and add them as objects to the UIView? Or can I use the Storyboard?
Could someone please explain how the hierarchi of objects would be structured?
In my head it would be:
UIViewController
-> UiView
---> UIScrollView
------> UITableView
------> UITableView
------> UITableView
------> UITableView
But trying this in Storyboard doesn't work. I assume each UITableView will want its own UITableViewController and what I have read in other posts I would likey need to do this connecting in the UIViewController implementation file.
Any help is appreciated.
I think you might try to drag UITableViewController into your view Controller, at least I don't have that problem to add 4 table view into a scroll view.
here is how i added it
1.> Drag the scroll view control into view controller
Your view controller should look like this:
2.> Drag the table view control into the scroll view, and set the size and position of that table view
Your view controller should look like this:
3.> Then drag all the rest 3 table views onto Scroll view
But i would like to suggest a couple of things in your case
no using that much table view in the same view controller, it's a chaos in your codes to maintain all them. There are always better
options than 4 table view, maybe consider collection view. or even
separate the use flow.
If i were you, i won't use table view inside Scroll view, they are like scroll view inside scroll view, if you don't design the
interaction very very well, they become extremely hard to use.
If you still want to use four table view in the same view controller after all, you want to pay extra attentions on your table view datasource and delegate. very carefully handle all the cases.
Hope that helps you.
Tableviews are very customized scrollviews. I wouldn't put 4 of them on a scrollview, this wouldn't be very intuitive for the user as your finger would scroll the view in many ways depending on where exactly it touches the screen.
Instead, try having your 4 tableviews in a 2x2 pattern directly onto a simple UIView. This can be done inside the Storyboard.
As for filling up and using them, you have 2 ways :
A) Your UIViewController is the delegate and datasource of each of the 4 tableviews. When executing, you perform a switch on the first parameter (the tableview that called you) to determine the appropriate course of action.
B) You create 4 classes that each handle a single tableview, instanciate 4 objects inside your UIViewController and assign the UITableviews' delegate and datasource properties to these objects.
All technicality aside, 4 tableviews in a single screen is pretty crowded. Your design will definitely not fly on a iPhone, so I'm assuming iPad only. Even then, you should make sure that everything is visually appealing and the purpose of each control is clear. It's up to you, but I'd hate to see you work hard on an application only to see your efforts wasted because your visual design doesn't appeal to your users.
If the table views take up the entire region of the scroll view then they wont let any scroll events past to the scroll view that contains them, unless the scroll is horizontal.
For a simple one to one between a table view and a view controller, I would make each table view part of it's own UITableViewController (so you have four), and then make a UIViewController that adds each of the UITableViewControllers to it as a child.
This way you don't have to do any fancy logic around if statements on which tableview is asking for data, because the table view controllers only have one table view.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/featuredarticles/ViewControllerPGforiPhoneOS/CreatingCustomContainerViewControllers/CreatingCustomContainerViewControllers.html
I have a Table View Controller that displays information using JSON. I want to change the styling of my app, and I don't want it to have that "table" view that it has now. Whats the easiest way to change my Table View Controller to a regular View Controller, the biggest problem I have is that the code uses a tableView and I dont know how to get it to work as a regular view controller.
I using a Storyboard with a TableViewController thats linked to a controller called UpcomingReleasesViewController.
I want my app:
To look like this:
My original answer was assuming you just wanted to convert from a UITableViewController to a UIViewController. Looking at your screen snapshots, I infer you really want to switch from a UITableViewController to a UICollectionViewController (which is an iOS 6 feature than allows you to do precisely what you want).
In that case, change your base class to UICollectionViewController, and replace your UITableViewDataSource methods with UICollectionViewDataSource methods. And then redesign your scene using a Collection View Controller.
See the Collection View Programming Guide for more information. Or see WWDC 2012 sessions Introducing Collection Views or Advanced Collection Views and Building Custom Layouts.
If you need to support iOS versions prior to 6, then you have to do this collection view style coding yourself manually, putting your image views on a scroll view and using a standard UIViewController. It require more effort than using a collection view, but can be done.
Original answer:
If this view controller will have a table view on it, but you just want to add more controls to the scene? If so, just change the view controller's base class from UITableViewController to UIViewController, create the new scene, add a table view to it, and specify the table view's delegate and data source to be the view controller:
Also, make sure you define an IBOutlet for your table view (and if you call it tableView, that will minimize any coding changes needed).
If you do that, you can quickly convert a UITableViewController based controller to a UIViewController with minimal code changes.
If you're looking to make something like your new UI mockup, look into UICollectionView. You'll see many of the same concepts (i.e. dataSource, delegate method signatures are similar) that are used in UITableViews used in the collectionView API.
Background
I'm using interface builder to create the UI for an app I'm working on. The app has a single screen that displays a series of buttons. Clicking on a button displays an associated view which overlays the buttons. Clicking another button hides the previous overlay view and displays another one.
Too make managing the UI easier in IB I've decided to create multiple nib files for each sub view that is to appear when clicking the relevant button. I'm then loading the sub view's nib file in the view controller's viewDidLoad method using the UINib class.
The idea behind this was to avoid having multiple views stacked on top of each other in a single nib file as this would be hard to manipulate in IB. I could have created all the views in code but this would require a lot of tedious coding as the layouts of each sub view are quite complex (with multiple child views).
Example code loading a sub view from a nib file.
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
UINib *aSubViewNib = [UINib nibWithNibName:#"aSubView" bundle:nil];
NSArray *bundleObjects = [aSubViewNib instantiateWithOwner:self options:nil];
// get root view from bundle array
UIView *aSubView = [bundleObjects objectAtIndex:0];
[self.view addSubview:aSubView];
...
The code above is repeated for the other views.
To summarise I have a single screen iPhone app that has layered views that are shown/hidden by clicking buttons. This is achieved with a single view controller with an associated nib file and a series of additional nib files for the sub views which are loaded in the view controller's viewDidLoad method.
Questions!
Sorry for the long introduction but I wanted to be very clear what it is I am doing.
Is my approach bad or unusual?
Are there any potential issues to doing it this way?
What have other people done when they need a dynamic interface and
still want to keep everything in Interface Builder?
Notes
Before anyone asks why don't I just display the sub views on a new screen and use the navigation bar, let me say that I have very good reasons and I do understand iOS UI guidelines. The above use case is not exactly my use case but it's one that clearly describes the problem without getting bogged down in my development app.
Also I know I could have written all the sub views as code but each sub view has a complex layout of child views and it would be a lot of code and messing around to try and get them looking right.
Thanks in advance.
There isn't necessarily a 1-to-1 relationship between view controllers and views. Most views contain many subviews, which are views themselves, so this literally doesn't make sense.
However, depending on the complexity of the views (including their content), you may want separate view controllers... or not.
For example, if you have two sbuviews that are each tableViews, you may want to have one view controller for each tableView. This is because each tableView is looking at the same delegate methods, and if they are in the same viewController, then the delegate methods have to differentiate between the tableViews. The delegate methods have signatures that allow this, but, in my experience, it can really make for a messy code design that is hard to follow and hard to manage.
On the other hand, you may have two tables that are managed by the same viewController, where one table is filled with meaningful data and the other is simply a place holder (as when the data source is empty). One might be visible while the other is not. Why make you life complicated by creating two view controllers when both are driven by the same data source (the model)?
In my mind, it comes down to how difficult it is to follow and manage the code. If the complexity of using a single view controller becomes burdensome, consider using more view controllers.
UPDATE
By the way, I have an example that I am currently working with that may illustrate a similar situation. In the InAppSettingsKit, that a lot of developers use, there are several xib files for pieces of the main view. You can look at the structure here on github. There is one main view controllers and several xib files. (There is also what I would call a "helper" view controller and an email composer view controller.) In this example, the xib files may be used multiple times to specify the layout of table view cells. There is no view controller for each xib file, though. (The documentation for InAppSettingsKit is sparse, so these things may not be obvious just by taking a quick look at it.)
Every View should have a corresponding UIViewController. Using one ViewController to "Control" more than one view breaks the MVC paradigm. "Controlling" multiple "views" from one controller will make it much harder to change one thing without breaking something else. The choices you make on how to present the content to the end user will be different for every individual. So if you say a NavigationController won't work in your case, maybe a Modal view is the answer or, you might just instantiate your custom UIViewControllers and add them to your view ([addSubview:]), if thats the road you want, but like I said, it would be beneficial for you to make a "controller" for each view object along with the corresponding xib. If you need information sent back, use a delegate or use Notifications to send the message back to the parent view. I learned the hard way that not following MVC paradigm, will make you life miserable. Try and keep your code as decoupled as possible. And read up on the MVC design pattern, you won't regret it.
actually its possible to do this.
Open your .xib file,select File’s Owner(in placeholder) -> "identity inspector" (utilities) -> change class name to your controller classname -> press control and drag file's owner placeholder to View object, select "view" in dialog.
Now you can customize your view.
p.s. you can use the same outlets as first xib, you need only to drag them to the new xib(+control sure).
here is an explained tutorial:
http://irawd.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/how-to-link-a-xib-file-to-a-class-and-use-2-xib-files-for-iphone4-and-iphone5/