I’m looking for a custom component or mini-framework that is capable of handling multi directional paging! Multi directional by means of supporting horizontal and vertical paging simultaneously!
I’d actually like to display data like a grouped UITableView does, grouped by individual sections and rows. Consider the following data example:
Section-A: row-1, row-2, row-3
Section-B: row-1
Section-C: row-1, row-2
This is obviously a standard use-case for a grouped UITableView and nothing special, right?
What i’d like to acomplish is, displaying the above data as paging views!
So i.e. when i page horizontally, paging is section based and i move from Section-A to Section-B etc.!
When i page vertically, i “page” through the single “rows” of a section etc.! I hope you guys get the point!
Technically this would be obviously achieved by nesting 2 UIScrollViews with enabled paging, restricting the single UIScrollViews by either vertical or horizontal paging. Then populating the scroll-views with data (i.e. views) in the right manner etc.
Another requirement would be to have a dynamic or semi-dynamic behavior! Dynamic by means of having the possibility to add “sections” and “rows” afterwards. Much like the UITableView behaves actually, with “cell” reuse etc.!
(Semi-Dynamic by means that i don’t need dynamic “row” insertions/deletions etc., just a simple “reloadData” would be sufficient)
So i looked for example into Andrey Vits ATPagingView of his SoloComponents!
ATPagingView looks like a promising foundation for solving my problems! I thought of extending the functionality to acomodate my requirments but would like to ask for advice on stackoverflow first!
So what do you think on this guys?
Is this actually a use case for a grid component?
Is there maybe a component or framework out there already matching my needs or was there never a need for multi directional paging views until yet! 😉
Right now i’m experimenting with ATPagingView for myself and i find it very useful for its purpose. It provides sort of a endless paging solution with cell reuse and is easy to set-up with only 2 delegate methods.
Why not wrap single ATPagingView instances into one “parent” UIScrollView, where each ATPagingView represents a “section” in your use case! Inside every ATPagingView you would then have pages as your “rows”. You could set up the outer (i.e. parent) UIScrollView to page only for example horizontally and the single ATPagingViews to scroll vertically.
You’d need some boilerplate code (i.e. something like numberOfSections etc.) in the outer UIScrollView to manage the “inner” ATPagingViews, but that would be a feasible approach i think.