Question

All,

I have about 3000 words with definitions that I am loading into a TableView. Right now, it’s just a sorted list of words, sans the sections because I haven’t added them yet.

I need to add sections to my TableView data (A,B,C …) and there seems to be several ways to do this so before I jump into this I am looking for some confirmation or correction if I am going down the wrong rabbit hole.

Currently the data that the TableView reads is stored as objects in an NSMutableArray per this code:

//AppDelegate.m
- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(UIApplication *)application
{

 //...

NSMutableArray *wordArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

//Loop through result set from DB and populate objects
while([rs next]){


       [wordArray addObject:[Word wordWith:[rs stringForColumn:@"word"]
                                 Definition:[rs stringForColumn:@"definition"] 
                               SectionIndex:[rs stringForColumn:@"sectionIndex"]]];



   }
   MainViewController *mainViewController = 
   [[MainViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"MainView" bundle:nil];

   mainViewController.listContent = wordArray;

   //...

 }

Each object has a section index value ([A-Z0-9]) so I already know which section each word goes in, I know what the sections need to be and I can easily derive a count of objects for each section. All the words have been sorted via SQL before the NSMutableArray was populated so that’s already handled.

Can I create multiple sections with the one NSMutableArray or do I need to do something different?

Thanks

Answer 1

You could store your words into arrays inside a NSDictionary holding keys for each letter.

Number of sections would return

[[dictionary allKeys] count];

Title for section

NSArray * keys = [dictionary allKeys];
[keys objectAtIndex:sectionIdx]

Number of rows in section would return

NSArray * keys = [dictionary allKeys];
[(NSArray *)[dictionary objectForKey:[keys objectAtIndex:sectionIdx]] count];

Each word would be

NSArray * keys = [dictionary allKeys];
[(NSArray *)[dictionary objectForKey:[keys objectAtIndex:sectionIdx]] objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];