Question

For the acani iPhone app, I’d like display groups (based on interests) in a UITableView. I’d like to organize the groups taxonomically, e.g.:

• Sports
  • Bat-and-ball
    • Baseball
    • Softball
    • Cricket
  • Hockey
    • Field Hockey
    • Ice Hockey
    • Roller Hockey
• Engineering
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Biochemical Engineering

How should I arrange this on a UITableView?

I’m thinking that there should be a root UITableView that will have the sections Sports & Engineering, and the cells Bat-and-ball & Hockey will be under the Sports section, and the cells Electrical Engineering & Biochemical Engineering will be under the Engineering section.

Then Bat-and-ball should have its own UITableView, which should have cells Baseball, Softball, and Cricket.

Does this sound like a good way to arrange the UI?

Do you have any sample code or links to Xcode sample code for a UI like this? There’s gotta be an Xcode sample project that does something like this. Perhaps the periodic table of elements project or Core Data Books?

Thanks!

Matt

Answer 1

You got it. A UITableView really isn’t designed to show more than two levels of a hierarchy, as sections and rows. If you want to show more than two levels, a “drill-down” approach used in most (all?) iOS apps, where tapping a row presents another UITableView on the navigation stack. (As you say.)

There are lots of Apple sample code projects that use this design pattern.

Edit: just checked and DrillDownSave is a good example, as is SimpleDrillDown.