Question

I’m creating an app that has a UITableView.

The data will be comming from an XML fetched over the net. I’m using NSXMLParser for this and it works. I used my tableView controller as the delegate for this so it implements the protocol for it:

@protocol NSXMLParserDelegate;
@interface MainView : UITableViewController <NSXMLParserDelegate>

Now this works perfectly, as I’ve nslogged the resulting parse.
Now, I want to populate the NStableView, so Reading I find that I need to add the datasource and delegate.

UITableViewDataSource

and

UITableViewDelegate

both of which are protocols.

How would I go about doing this on the same class? can I implement more than one protocol with the same class? should I move the delegation of the parser to another object and use this controller for this purpose?

Basically the question is what is the best way to do this?

thank you

Answer 1

Sure, you can implement as many protocols in a class as you want:

@interface MainView : UITableViewController <NSXMLParserDelegate, UITableViewDataSource, UITableViewDelegate>

Is that the “proper” way of doing that? I don’t think there’s a “right” answer to that. A purist might say no. I’d say do it where is makes sense, but err on the side of breaking it out into separate classes. For example, if your view controller is a simple menu then it would make sense for your view controller to also be your table view delegate and data source; there’s no advantage in breaking it out into multiple classes.

If you have to parse XML my intuition suggests that it’s starting to get a bit more complex. Maybe have a data class that implements the data source and XML parser and a controller class?