Question

I have an NSDictionary that we will say is like this:

key:       value:
name       Bookshelf
movies     Array containing: (Movie 1, Movie 2, Movie 3)
books      Array containing: (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3)
music      Array containing: (Music 1, Music 2, Music 3)

And so on. Now what I’m trying to do is create a tableView that displays all this information, but with different types of cells based on what the dictionary key is. For example, movies use cellForMovies books use cellForBooks music use cellForMusic, each has it’s own layout.

Obviously, I am oversimplifying, but hopefully you understand what I’m trying to do.

I am able to accomplish this if I do sections and a different cell type for each section, but I don’t want to do that. I want to be able to have a table like this, for example:

cellForBooks
cellForMovies
cellForMovies
cellForMusic
cellForBooks

and so on…Any ideas or resources you can point me to? I only care about iOS 5 support (storyboards).

Edit with solution:

A big thank you to everyone who helped, especially atticus who put the final piece together.

What ended up working was to change the structure of the data to be an array of dictionaries and then add a Key: type Value: book/movie/music to each entry. The data structure now looks like:

Array[0]: Dictionary: [Key: type Value: book], [Key: name Value: Physics];
Array[1]: Dictionary: [Key: type Value: music], [Key: name Value: Rock];

Then to configure the cells I did this:

NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";
NSDictionary *object = [self.listOfStuff objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];
if ([[object objectForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"book"]){
    CellIdentifier = @"BookCell";
}else if ([[object objectForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"music"]){
    CellIdentifier = @"MusicCell";
}else if ([[object objectForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"movie"]){
    CellIdentifier = @"MovieCell";
}

each of these had a different tableviewcell in the storyboard. We figured out if you want to use any of the built-in cell features, like cell.textLabel.text you needed to do this:

cell.textLabel.text = [object objectForKey:@"name"];
cell.textLabel.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; 
cell.textLabel.opaque = NO;

Hope this helps someone else in the future.

Answer 1

A big thank you to everyone who helped, especially atticus who put the final piece together.

What ended up working was to change the structure of the data to be an array of dictionaries and then add a Key: type Value: book/movie/music to each entry. The data structure now looks like:

Array[0]: Dictionary: [Key: type Value: book], [Key: name Value: Physics];
Array[1]: Dictionary: [Key: type Value: music], [Key: name Value: Rock];

Then to configure the cells I did this:

NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";
NSDictionary *object = [self.listOfStuff objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];
if ([[object objectForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"book"]){
    CellIdentifier = @"BookCell";
}else if ([[object objectForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"music"]){
    CellIdentifier = @"MusicCell";
}else if ([[object objectForKey:@"type"] isEqualToString:@"movie"]){
    CellIdentifier = @"MovieCell";
}

each of these had a different tableviewcell in the storyboard. We figured out if you want to use any of the built-in cell features, like cell.textLabel.text you needed to do this:

cell.textLabel.text = [object objectForKey:@"name"];
cell.textLabel.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; 
cell.textLabel.opaque = NO;

Hope this helps someone else in the future.