Question

I developed some application ’till now. Now I’m writing a new one and in this project I want to keep the code very clean, so it’s very easy to find the methods.
I want to start with the UIViewControllers whose view have a UITableView as subview. I wish to have a file with the name DetailViewController for all functions which belong directly to it. Another file with the name DetailViewController+Protocols should contain a category of the class above and all these delegate methods of UITableView.

Is it possible to do something like this? I want to keep my code clean and split it into multiple files.

---

EDIT

DetailViewController.h

@interface DetailViewController : UIViewController

... Some Properties

... Some Methods

@end

DetailViewController.m

#import "DetailViewController.h"

@implementation DetailViewController

... Some Synthesizes

... Some Methods

@end

DetailViewController+Protocols.h

@interface DetailViewController (Protocols) <UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource>

@end

DetailViewController+Protocols.m

@implementation DetailViewController (Protocols)

- (NSINteger)numberOfSections
{
    return ...;
}

- (NSInteger)numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
    if (section == 0)
        return ...;

    return ...;
}

...

@end

But then Xcode shows a warning that some of the delegate methods are not implemented in DetailViewController. I also tried it with importing the DetailViewController+Protocols.h in the DetailViewController.h. No changing.
Then I tried it with ignoring the warnings and see: It worked! But why? Shouldn’t it work without these warnings?

Answer 1

Yes it is. The only thing to keep in mind with categories is that you cannot @synthesize properties in them. Adding ivars in categories is more difficult as well.

See this for more info on that.