Question

I have a list of name and values I need to display. It’s difficult to maintain lots of labels and associated content textfields in IB so I’m thinking of using UITableView. Is there a way to fix the labels for cells, then just either bind to an NSDictionary and display the key/value names or fix the cells and labels in a UITableView?

Answer 1

You can’t bind to the table view as you might do when writing OS/X apps, but the two methods below, in your UITableView’s datasource should do the trick:

@property (strong, nonatomic) NSDictionary * dict;
@property (strong, nonatomic) NSArray * sortedKeys;

- (void) setDict: (NSDictionary *) dict 
{
    _dict = dict;
    self.sortedKeys = [[dict allKeys] sortedArrayUsingSelector: @selector(caseInsensitiveCompare:)];

    [self.tableView reloadData];
}


- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
    return [self.sortedKeys count];
}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"Cell" forIndexPath: indexPath];

    NSString * key = self.sortedKeys[indexPath.row];
    NSString * value = dict[key];

    cell.textLabel.text = key;
    cell.detailTextLabel.text = value;

    return cell;
}

---

or in Swift

var sortedKeys: Array<String> = []
var dict:Dictionary<String, String> = [:] {
didSet {
    sortedKeys = sort(Array(dict.keys)) {$0.lowercaseString < $1.lowercaseString}
    tableView.reloadData()
}
}

override func tableView(tableView: UITableView!, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int {
    return sortedKeys.count
}

override func tableView(tableView: UITableView!, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath!) -> UITableViewCell!  {

    let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("Cell") as UITableViewCell

    let key = sortedKeys[indexPath.row] as String
    let value = dict[key] as String

    cell.textLabel.text = key
    cell.detailTextLabel.text = value

    return cell
}