Question

I am following the BigNerdRanch iOS Programming book and I am on this one chapter that deals with UITableViewController. I have been wondering however where UITableViewController finds out about its delegate and dataSource. Currently I have it as

@interface ItemsViewController : UITableViewController <UITableViewDataSource, UITableViewDelegate>

But there is nothing that looks like:

[self.tableView setDelegate:self]

I am just wondering how the UITableViewController finds out about its delegate and dataSource

Answer 1

If you were setting up the UITableView yourself, you would have to point it to a delegate and data source.

UITableViewController sets up the UITableView and sets the delegate and dataSource properties to itself. When you subclass UITableViewController, you get this behavior for free.

Your question is flawed because UITableViewController doesn’t have a dataSource and delegate, the UITableView it is controlling does. And the UITableViewController is the dataSource and delegate because it sets things up that way.