Question

I realize this is a popular topic, and I’ve searched through many posts here but haven’t found anything that has helped my issue. I’m a beginner, for what it’s worth (as you’ll see by my question 🙂

My app has a tab bar with 3 items. The first loads a UINavigationController that is intended to have 3 “screens” to drill-down through (first: UITableView, second: filtered UITableView, third: UIView). I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to show the UITableView on the 2nd screen, programmatically.

I’m overriding - (void)loadView since I’m not using IB. At different times, I’ve tried things like:

- (void)loadView
{
    [super loadView];

    // first option (thought for sure this would work)
    [[self view] addSubview:secondTableView];

    // another...
    [self tableView:secondTableView];

    // another...
    [[[[self navigationController] topLevelController] view] addSubview:secondTableController];
}

I do have the table view setup properly with it’s delegate and datasource, I just can’t figure out how to show the damn thing. The 2nd controller is also inheriting from UITableViewController. Additionally, I don’t know how you can say “fit this table view within the navigation title and the tab bar menu”. I’m using CGRectMake() currently to guess the sizes, but it seems like there should be a better way (maybe that’s why you use IB :-). Either way, that’s secondary to even getting something to show up in the first place.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Answer 1

If you’re inheriting from UITableViewController your view should be a UITableView not a plain UIView, then when you want to create a view programmatically you should allocate it, initialize it, set its properties and assign it as your controller’s view, I haven’t tried [super loadView] before but it’s creating the tableView for you and assigning dataSource and delegate to self, so you don’t have to do that. So it should go like this

- (void)loadView {
    UITableView *tempPointer = [[UITableView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 320, 480) andStyle:UITableViewStylePlain];
    self.view = tempPointer;  // controller retains view property so we should release it
    [tempPointer release];
    // If you want your view to be resized automatically (to fit)
    self.view.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth;
    self.tableView.dataSource = self;
    self.tableView.delegate = self;
    //...
}

or

- (void)loadView {
    [super loadView];
    self.tableView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth;
    secondTableView = self.tableView; // or change your code to cope with self.tableView instead of secondTableView...
    //...
}

Clear out some uncertainties about view hierarchy creation, retaining etc in the documentation about both UIViewController and UITableViewController if you haven’t already.