I am working on an app using objective C and Xcode.
For the moment I am using a table view and returning rows with cells containing an image thumb and title. My problem is that now i need to change the layout and for 4 of the cells I need to make them fall on the same row (so each article of the 4 should be 50% width). So basically create 2 columns but only for 4 of the articles. The rest remain on 1 column (full width).
I would add an image but I don't have enough rep points.
I know there is some thing like collection view...but I am not very familiar with that one and I was hoping maybe there's an easier way than redoing the viewcontroller and all the connections I already have created there.
Since I am already using tableview..what's the best way to change the layout to fit what I need now?
Based on what you're trying to do a UICollectionView might not be the best bet. I would create a second type of UITableViewCell for those rows with 4 columns. This should help Multiple Custom Rows UITableView?
You can use UICollectionView with flowlayout and variable cell width. There are many tutorials about it out there.
You can also try this library: https://github.com/bryceredd/RFQuiltLayout
Have you taken a look at this library:TSUIKit
If you just want to quickly arrange your data, this would be much easier than trying to wrangle with UICollectionView.
Related
I want to achieve an UICollectionView that contains 2 sections,
Grid of categories icons
List of items
Something like this in the design:
Usually we use 1 UICollectionViewFlowLayout and set the sizes of cell to be grid of list.
Where should I start with using 2 Layouts or something different ?
In my App I have a lot of layouts similar to this one.
We ended using your same solution: A UICollectionView with two sections and a GridViewLayout, simply, in the second section the margins will be zero and the cell will have width == collectionView width. Don't do strange things like merge two collections or a collection and a scrollView to contain everithing, that's Spaghetti code 😉
Just an Hint, if you want a simpler solution to manage your cells and the order they will be presented inside your collection, try to use an MVVM approach to represent them, i could give you same code examples but not here... Contact me directly
You can find an example of how I organize my collectionViews dataSources here: https://medium.com/#oni.zerone/an-mvvm-approach-to-uicollectionview-49876522e01c
A CocoaPod with a library about this is here: https://github.com/Oni-zerone/PowerTools
I am looking at the lower portion of this screenshot. If I had something similar to this in my design, what would be the best way to set this up in Swift?
I have looked into UITableView, but that doesn't seem to be quite what I need. Most of the tutorials & articles I've read regarding the UITableView only focus on 1 or 2 columns max, and don't really expand on how to go much beyond that.
I briefly considered just doing a bunch of statically placed labels, but realized that I will not always know exactly how many items are going to be in the table, so I need a more dynamic way of going about it.
Does anybody else have any advice on how I might go about achieving this sort of layout in Swift?
There are several ways...
UITableViewCell subsclass. It's perfect for your purposue, and you can design it's contents following your needs. (No matter if 2, 3 or 4 columns)
Combination of StackView Vertical with StackView Horizontal inside. Each horizaontal view will contains one of your row.
Generate a HTML page and injec it in a SFSafariViewController or WebView.
Static content. A plenty of UILabel. One for each piece of information
In my opinion the best aproach is the UITableViewCell subsclass.
How can I implement a table with rows and columns in Objective-C? I need to show a timetable: columns for week's day and rows for hours. I have no idea. TableView makes rows. Would UICollectionView be right for this?
You can use UITableView. But instead of using the default UITableViewCell, you have to create a custom cell with 7 labels equally spacing horizontally. Then you add 24 rows, each for one hour. And I think that's all you need, simple and straight forward.
That depends on how you want to eventually display it. What I usually do is create an array ( or two, or three if needed) and then pull from that when I want to display parts of it. The reason I said I might need one or two is that one might be for strings and another might be for for integers or float values. It all depends on the situation and you have to make sure you keep them synchronized programmatically.
I have an app which will show over a 1000 items, all of those item details are local ( saved via coredaata) and will ship with the app.
In researching the UI mechanisms to show those items, I am in between choosing uicollectionview or tableviewcontroller with a customized cell.
My question is : Which choice would be more efficient and provide a smoother UI in terms of
dragging?
which one can I customize to load out the 1000 entries I have only enough the provide a smooth scroll, and load more cells as needed?
Thanks.
Both approachs will handle 1000 entries easily if you follow the good practices of view/cell reusing. Additionally both APIs are very similar, so jumping from one to the other is not that hard.
The main difference between the two is how you want to display those 1000 items. UITableView has a couple of styles of cells stacked one over the other. You should not try to bend it to do any other kind of things too much complex than that kind of layout. UICollectionView is a much more powerful set of classes that allow to modify almost every aspect of how your data will appear in screen, specially its layout, but also other things. You can see UITableViews in almost every iOS application (for example Contacts or iPod), while UICollectionViews are more difficult to see (the grid in Photos, but also the coverflow in iPod).
So, if you need something standard like most table views in iOS I will choose the UITableView, but if you need more control over your layout, go with UICollectionView.
It's slightly unclear what you're asking, so I have summerized the advantages of both.
UITableView
UITableView is the base mechanism for displaying sets of data on iOS. It's a simple list, which displays single-dimensional rows of data. It's smooth because of cell reuse and other magic.
UICollectionView
UICollectionView is the model for displaying multidimensional data - it was introduced just a year or two ago with iOS 6, I believe.
It's also smooth because of the same tactics used in UITableView - cell reuse, etc.
I am currently working on an iPad application that uses a table view to present data, I was inspired by the iTunes application in iPad that present it's data in multiple columns in a very nice and neat manner, and the most interesting thing is that during the portrait mode the itunes application displays data in 2 columns but when the user switches to landscape mode, it switches the display to 3 columns (since there are plenty of space to display data horizontally).
This is what i'm talking about:
but i found out that iOS SDK only supports single column for tableview (it would be nice to utilize the entire space provided on iPad screen to present data), i did some research and i found out that the best way to present data in multiple columns yet like spreadsheet style is to use datagridview instead, but iOS SDK did not provide any data grid view controls for iOS developers.
I found out over the internet some customized tables like:
AQGridView.
DTGridView.
and also the one from this:
http://usxue.is-programmer.com/posts/14176.html
and the one from this:
http://xebee.xebia.in/2011/04/14/building-editable-gridview-for-iphone-apps/
But sadly none of these ever met the requirements of the application i was working on.
Could you guys provide me some ideas or share some sample codes or links on how to display data in somehow-data grid view, to achieve similar effect used in iTunes application (as shown above).. Any form of help would be pretty much appreciated. Thank you guys!
The summary answer is, place multiple data "views" across in a single cell.
The more detailed answer:
Create custom views that represent the single cells you want. You can for this purpose make them resizable enough to work two across or three across (they will get loaded into 1/2 or 1/3 of the cells bounds).
Then make a custom UITableView cell, that can take two or three data items - load up an instance of the custom view previously created in the cell for each data item you have, placing them next to each other. You can have the cell do the view layout when groups of data items are added.
In the cellForRow code in the table delegate/datasource, you use your data source in groups of two or three (and report the row count accordingly) to pass along to the custom cell.
Sorry I can't share code, but I have used this technique before in other applications.
What's wrong with creating a UIView class to represent a single cell, and another that lays out an array of those cells in a grid? Put your grid view in a UIScrollView and you're about done.
UITableView is obviously a pretty complex class. Much of that is to make it very general, very reusable, and able to support a huge number of rows. Your class doesn't necessarily need to be that complicated -- if you have a fairly small number of cells, your "grid" could really just be a UIView in which you lay out cells in rows and columns. UITableView removes cells that aren't seen in order to save memory; you might need to do something similar if you have hundreds of cells, especially if they're large, but a few dozen probably won't require that.
In short, since you need a grid view for a particular use, you don't need to do all the extra work that would be required for a general, reusable solution.