Question

I’ve been developing iPhone apps for a while now and something that’s always peeved me is that I haven’t found a comprehensive way to organize my application files.

I know that an iPhone project is technically MVC, but it seems like most everything I do is in a ViewController. I notice that as a project goes on, my ViewControllers continue to get more and more bloated and I can’t help but think that there has to be a better way than this. I also do some ruby on rails and I like the fact that on that platform there is such a clear separation of concerns and an established way to organize an application.

Has anyone discovered a way that they especially fond of for organizing the application?
Also how do cut back on the view controller bloat?

Answer 1

I agree, just about everything seems to land in view controller classes, and they get unwieldy in a hurry. There are several things you could try:

• Create separate classes for delegates, if they don’t actually need to be part of the view controller;
• Put delegate method implementations into a category, as described here;
• Factor out any methods that don’t actually interact with the rest of the view controller, and put them in separate classes
• Use blocks for asynchronous callbacks when they make sense, because they are often less verbose than explicit callback methods;
• Or even just organize your methods carefully and use #pragma mark so Xcode can help you navigate through the file.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, and others may have better suggestions.