Question

From documentation, it seems that UITableViewController would create its own Table View while being initialized. So its tableView property would point to a Table View object right after initialization.

My questions are :

1.Is it possible to create our own table view object and assign it to the tableView property of the UITableViewController object ?

2.If the above assignment can be made, do we have to worry about releasing the old Table View
object that originally comes with the controller ?

3.If we can use our own custom made table view object, is it advisable to do so ?

Answer 1

1. Yes, you can create your own tableView object and assign it as you would any other property.

2. No, you don’t have to worry about it. If you look at the property declaration in UITableViewController, it is as follows:

   @property(nonatomic, retain) UITableView *tableView;
   

   Therefore, it will release and retain automatically provided you use its setter or dot notation (i.e. self.tableView = …).

3. I’ve created my own custom UITableView objects quite a few times, but as Mark Adams noted, if you do this, you may as well create a subclass of UIViewController and add a UITableView to it, though you can still use UITableViewController if you want to.