Question

I wish to display a dynamic set of data (pulled live over a TCP connection) on the iPhone that is not too unlike lines from a terminal.

This means that the lines will be very long and really cannot be wrapped.

What is the best way of accomplishing this?

I want to use a UITableView because then memory issues would be less of a concern because the lines of text would be loaded/unloaded automatically each line of text would be a cell.

I have thought about this a bit and I came up with a possible solution, but I am not sure if it would actually work.

I could put a UITableView in a UIScrollView and only let the containing UIScrollView scroll horizontally.

Then I would adjust the frame of the UITableView and UITableViewCells so that they are much wider as calculated by the longest line of text.

I have read that you really don’t want to nest a UITableView in a UIScrollView since UITableView is in fact a subclass of UIScrollView. Since UITableView is a subclass of UIScrollView, is there someway I can enable the horizontal scrolling and make the frame wider?

If either of those ideas would actually work, could you also tell me which properties I should change (frame or contentSize etc).

Answer 1

I ended up putting a UILabel in a UIScrollView and just kept an array of all the lines and made the UILabel the minimum necessary width and height.

I then set the number of lines of the UILabel to the number of elements in the array. This works because there is no textwrapping.

I think this should be fine performance wise, but we’ll see.

You can see it in action in my app Adminium for Bukkit/Minecraft: