Question

I want to draw a vertical line between the SectionIndex column and the cell content view. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Refer to this post:

how to add vertical lines to a table view in iphone sdk?

Refer to Kris Markel’s there in the above post. It suggests this link:

http://www.iphonedevx.com/?p=153

Note: I have copied code from the whole link and pasted it here, just to make sure answer remains useful even in case if the link goes down in future:

UITableView is probably the most used view on the iPhone. It’s
flexible and the UI is ideally suited to use on the iPhone. There are
lots of examples on how to add multiple items to a UITableViewCell.
However, I needed to present some data in a more traditional
spreadsheet style grid. The results worked well and enabled me to pack
a lot of information on the screen that was very hard to follow
without the vertical grid. I’ll show a very simplified version here
you can use to add vertical lines to your UITableView.

First we need to create a subclass of UITableViewCell. This is so we
can override drawrect and draw our lines and to add an array to hold a
list of positions where we’ll draw the lines.

@interface MyTableCell : UITableViewCell {
    NSMutableArray *columns;
}
- (void)addColumn:(CGFloat)position;
@end

In this simplified example we’ll leave the positioning of the actual
text in the cells in the UITableViewController and place it manually
(full source code is attached at the end). We’re just providing a
mechanism for drawing vertical lines to make a grid. Column locations
are added by calling addColumn:

- (void)addColumn:(CGFloat)position {
    [columns addObject:[NSNumber numberWithFloat:position]];
}

Now lets override drawRect. In it we grab the current graphics context
and set the line color and width. Then we iterate over our columns
array drawing a line from the top of the cell row to the bottom at
each position stored in the array.

- (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect {
    CGContextRef ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
    // Use the same color and width as the default cell separator for now
    CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(ctx, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0);
    CGContextSetLineWidth(ctx, 0.25);

    for (int i = 0; i < [columns count]; i++) {
        CGFloat f = [((NSNumber*) [columns objectAtIndex:i]) floatValue];
        CGContextMoveToPoint(ctx, f, 0);
        CGContextAddLineToPoint(ctx, f, self.bounds.size.height);
    }

    CGContextStrokePath(ctx);

    [super drawRect:rect];
}
To add columns to the view just call

[cell addColumn:50];
when you’re building each cell.

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {

    NSString *MyIdentifier = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"MyIdentifier %i", indexPath.row];

    MyTableCell *cell = (MyTableCell *)[tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:MyIdentifier];

    if (cell == nil) {
        cell = [[[MyTableCell alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero reuseIdentifier:MyIdentifier] autorelease];

        UILabel *label = [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0, 0, 30.0,
                                                           tableView.rowHeight)] autorelease];
        [cell addColumn:50];
        label.tag = LABEL_TAG;
        label.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:12.0];
        label.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", indexPath.row];
        label.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentRight;
        label.textColor = [UIColor blueColor];
        label.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin |
        UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight;
        [cell.contentView addSubview:label]; 

        label =  [[[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(60.0, 0, 30.0,
                                                            tableView.rowHeight)] autorelease];
        [cell addColumn:120];
        label.tag = VALUE_TAG;
        label.font = [UIFont systemFontOfSize:12.0];
        // add some silly value
        label.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", indexPath.row * 4];
        label.textAlignment = UITextAlignmentRight;
        label.textColor = [UIColor blueColor];
        label.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin |
        UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight;
        [cell.contentView addSubview:label];
    }

    return cell;
}

Hope this helps.