Question

Ok, I am creating an app that serves as a virtual catalog for certain items. The problem is that there are over 600 items that need to be cataloged, and that’s is extremely time consuming because I have to first add these items to a table cell viewer, along with the image of the item, then also insert a picture and 3 items of text into a view controller. Is there any way I can create a single view (or similar), and then when the user taps on the table cell that’s connected to the single view, it’s connected to code that will insert those items into defined spaces in the single view controller?

This app is using ARC and Storyboards. I am using Xcode 4.3.3 with iOS 5.

Answer 1

You can have an array of images or image URLs along with title, description, etc. and then use a grid view of some sort to lay them out (Sam Soffes’ grid view or just a UITableView)

And then use code similar to this, where “configure the cell” means:

cell.title = [titles objectAtIndex:[indexPath row]];
cell.image = [UIImage imageWithData:[NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:
              [imageURLs objectAtIndex:[indexPath row]]];
cell.description = [descriptions objectAtIndex:[indexPath row]];

If you can get the urls and text in a CSV file onto your device, then you can build the array with Dave DeLong’s CSV parser.