I'm making a UITableView that is going to act as a settings view controller. Obviously its going to have a few types of input. One cell might have a slider, one might drill down to another view controller, one with a textbox etc. Is there any way to avoid making umpteen different subclasses for UITableViewCell?
Try this github project: QuickDialog.
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Thinking it over, this feels like a bit of a noob MVC question, but I can't come up with or find a definitive answer so I feel I should ask and get some clarity for myself.
I have a custom view that I created using a xib. It is going to be used in, currently, 4 other places in my app. Each usage has identical functionality, so I'm basically just creating a custom control object that I can reuse multiple times.
My "control object" consists of a UITextField, and two UIButtons.
The functionality I'm looking at implementing is, the first button will bring up a UIPicker and the 2nd button is essentially a done button and will just resignFirstResponder on the UITextField. As previously mentioned, this is consistent everywhere this will be used.
What I'm curious about is, is it ok for me to build this functionality directly into the custom UIView subclass since it is consistent behaviour for all instances of my control object? Or, do I need to create a custom UIViewController subclass to go along with it?
Currently, in my main UIViewController for my app I am creating instances of my custom UIView "control object" and treating them the same as any other control object. If I should actually be creating a custom UIViewController class to go along with it, well, I'll have more questions for another thread as to how I should be doing that (unless someone can direct me to a resource on this)
So far, searching the web has yielded nothing for me and from everything I've seen so far with iOS development in general, I've gotten the vibe that UIViewControllers are really only ever for a main, presentable view (that takes up the entire screen.. I might be missing some terminology for this).
My gut feeling is that no view controller is necessary in the scenario I'm describing, but I'd like to try to get some sort of confirmation, if possible.
There is no silver bullet, so no approach is absolutely right or absolutely wrong. What you describe here is just a view that changes its states. So putting everything in your UIView subclass is completely OK. It also conforms to the KISS principle.
However, as far as I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, the input of your custom view - the text and the picked value from the picker does not really affects the view itself, but the viewController it's attached to. So you need to pass that input to the hosting viewController. This can be achieved by protocol with a default implementation. So the handling of the input data is written only once, but can be attached to whatever viewController you want.
Based off of everything that you've said, I see no need for another view controller. I can see where the answer could be a little unclear considering that the actions are something that ViewControllers usually handle, but I think you'll be just fine letting your custom view handle this by itself.
If you add more functionality or more complex operations, then perhaps it is time to explore other options but for now I think the single view will be fine.
For creating a login page or something like that, in autolayout case I use tableView instead of using a scrollView in viewController. For IndexPath majority cases I reuse the customCell. For entirely different items only I use another customCell. Since the Cell Class are increasing in my project. I dont know is it a good practice. Please share your opinion to increase the overall performance and least memory usage for my application.
Putting UITableView in all views is not a good practice every time.
I recommend using scrollviews and content views inside them in pages like login.
Use Tableviews only in those screens which show repeated contents.
I have seen codes generated through tableview controllers in every page.
I dont do in that way.
Better you go for Scrollviews.. Its a good method as far as I have seen.
I am writing a text editing app. I target iOS 6 and 7, and use storyboards and autolayout.
I thought this layout for the welcome screen would work well:
<Files in a table view>
<Instructions to user>
<Settings>
The settings view is pretty complex, and will probably benefit from having its own view controller. The instructions view is static, and has no logic.
I can think of three ways to organize this:
Create this as a table with three sections, where the 1st section is the list of files, and the 2nd and 3rd section are big, custom cells with.
Wrap all three views in a scrollview
Wrap the instructions and settings in a scrollview
I prefer the first solution, as it seems to be the, most natural way for the user to navigate, but I haven't seen any examples of adding a viewcontroller as a cell for a tableview anywhere, and haven't been able to google me any. Prototype cells do not seem like the right way to go for the settings view/controller either.
Best practice, suggestions, input?
Apple recommends only one view controller per "screen," so that rules out option 1. I wouldn't want to even start to attempt to embed a viewcontroller in a table cell and that just smells very wrong in any case.
You have three independent views that you want to scroll, and that clearly calls for a UIScrollView. As for the best way to organize this, I recommend creating modular UIView subclasses: one for the table, one for the instructions, one for the settings. See my answer on this question as to how you can package up views as reusable (not important in your case) and modular widgets: UIView and initWithFrame and a NIB file. How can i get the NIB file loaded?. Then you can create delegate interfaces for each one, and set your main view controller to implement them in order to communicate with each of the three "widgets."
I found this in SO; it doesn't exactly answer my question, which is: is there a way to clone a UITableView from one controller to another while using Storyboards and maintain synchronization?
You can clone them in the sense that their initial property values remain the same, like position, layout etc. For this, just copy the UITableView from storyboard, go to destination view controller and paste it there.
If you share same UITableView object between two view controllers, it is still possible, but you must estimate how much work you would have to do yourself. When a view controller solely handles a table view, much of the work is done under the hood and table is handed over to you. In case of your UITableView shared between two view controllers, you would have to play with it quite carefully. You need to take care of entire life cycle of the view - see the usual methods like viewDidLoad, viewDidAppear and so on. How would you take care of them when your view exists in two scenes? Maybe you would be inventing a unique design pattern - if at all you find the most optimistic and programmatically correct way to accomplish it.
With storyboards, you cannot achieve cloning up to the level wherein data changes will reflect seamlessly between the two. Storyboard is, as the name suggest, just a board, where you can draw things to know how would they look initially, before your code takes over.
In order to achieve what you want, you have to create a shared model that updates two table views through proper delegate methods. Most likely such a model (NSArray, or any such collections as per your requirement) can reside inside a shared class (app delegate isn't a wrong choice), from where both your view controllers can refer to it. That is neat practice, it not only is right from programming perspective but also extensible and helpful to anyone who deals with the code any time.
For details about how to update UI from your model, there is nothing better than starting from scratch, going through the books I mean.
I am not aware of such possibilities.
I would pass the tableview source object amongst different controllers and let the view controller handle their own table view.
I think the best approach would be to use a framework such as the freely available Sensible TableView, then use the same model for both table views. This should be really straight forward.
I'm writing a app that contains quite a bit of input fields for collecting data.
and im wondering what are some good methods to display these kind of input fields, if there are too many to fit on a screen? so something like the add contact screen... where u can scroll down and there are fields there
my initial idea is to put them in a scroll view and then i can scroll through them, is there a tutorial to do this? it seems like the scroll view is more for dynamically displaying data like a text view, and not for static forms like i was describing.
if anyone has any different methods for doing this please post.
UITableview will match perfectly for what you need.
My friend wrote this which is a container view that automatically helps with moving fields out of the way of the keyboard - It will certainly save you some time if you don't want to use a UITableView:
https://github.com/mackross/GTKeyboardHelper
The other way as H2CO3 suggested is to use a UITableView. If it is a UITableViewController, then you get the moving out of the keyboards way automatically. You could build custom table view cells that are styled to have a prompt and a UITextField for input. You can also set the selectionStyle to UITableViewCellSelectionStyleNone to prevent these cells from highlighting when selected.
I think the third way is to do this with a UINavigationController (or a UIPageControl) and build a kind of wizard, where you go through various pages of related data. This might be the neatest way depending on how many fields you have and if you can group data into common sets (e.g. personal information, work information etc)
I had the same problem and found GTKeyboardHelper to be an easy way out.
After drag and drop the framework in your project, include the header file.
Download and open the example project, then drag the "Keyboard Helper" object from the objects section in the xib to the objects section in your project's interface builder.
Drag and drop all your views to be children of the "Keyboard Helper".