Question

I’m loading a UIViewController into one of my Nav controller’s hierarchies, which will contain some text and some images. At the bottom, I will want to create a expandable and collapsable tableview.

First off, is this idea possible? If it is, how do I add it and where do I place the data source and delegate methods?

Can I just make a separate subclass of the TableViewController and then add it to my ViewController as a subview?

Answer 1

Yes, you can create a UITableView whose delegate, datasource, and parent view are not necessarily a UITableViewController. Since the UITableView is a UIView, you can add it as a subview of any other UIView. Any NSObject can be the delegate or datasource, as long as you implement the required protocol methods.

@interface MyViewController : UIViewController <UITableViewDelegate, UITableViewDataSource> 

In fact, in my experience, not many people even use UITableViewControllers. When was the last time you wanted your table view to take up the entire usable space? In general, I create a plain old UIViewController and add a UITableView as a subview of its view, in addition to other subviews.