Question

I have a problem with my App for iPhone.

Enviroment: I have a TableView, that operates above an MutableArray datasource. An example would be Lap Times for Go cart pilots.

Datasource: I record lap times from both training sessions and from race and qualifying. I consider race + qualifying as one subset of data and training sessions as another subset of data because I think there is big psychological effect and my drivers have slower laps when racing because of fear of crashing into others. At this time I record both data in one array with a variable of Bool “fromRace”. So I can filter racing and out of race times.

Human Interface: I created a TabBar that shows racing times in first Tab and training times in second Tab. It feels, like those Tabs contain basically the same view and operate on same data which I just filter using the same view controller since all the methods are the same.

Is it programatically correct to create two separate view controllers and two separate arrays for the datasource basically duplicating the code? Or try somehow to try to discover from which tab I came and alter the data presentation accordingly using just one view controller?

I hope I am clear on what I ask for.

Answer 1

Yes – broadly speaking, a UITabBar is used exclusively to switch between view controllers. That’s how it’s designed to operate – you load each ‘slot’ in the tab-bar up with a view controller.

That doesn’t mean you have to create two separate view controllers – you could create two instances of the same view controller, and have some flag passed in upon initialisation that would display the data in a different way.

If you just wanted to have a single view controller adapt to display the data in different ways a UIToolBar would be a more appropriate UI element (perhaps with a segmented controller at the bottom).