Question

OK. I’m a highly experinced iOS developer and one thing i allways stumble into is how to populate the tableview in a nicely mannor.
If your app is one of the thousands-thin apps with just a tableview, you can use the cellForRowAtIndexPath: datasource-method fine with a couple of if() clauses in.

But the app that I’m maintaining is very large and with a lot of dynamic cells that change in order and design you’ll end up with a completely greasy if()-heirachy that nobody – even your self – can maintain in the long run.

So I’ve decided to start a thread on ideas to solve this messy stuff. So any ideas is good input.

One idea could be to create a collection of UITableViewCells and just query into that collection in the cellForRowAtIndexPath:.

Another idea could be to build an entire object graph of the tree you want, query into that and have a factory class to build your UITableViewCell according to the current object.

Please, let me hear how you’ve solved this business in YOUR app – and how the solution works in the long run. Pro’s and Con’s are welcome 🙂

Answer 1

Stackoverflow isn’t a forum (where one may find threads and discussions where this would be appropriate), but a collection of programming-oriented questions.

Take this statement, from the second section of the FAQ:

If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here.

If you’d like a large number of ideas for your issue, maybe Stackoverflow’s chatrooms would be a better place to look- alternatively, there are several forums on other parts of the internet that would be a perfect place to hold a discussion about this topic.

If, however, you are just looking for a single way to manage your dynamic UITableViewCell’s in a more organized manner, you may want to edit your post to prompt for an answer instead of a discussion. On which subject, I’ve never had to use an excessive amount of dynamic cells, but for small amounts, I feel creating other functions (such as

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellType1ForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath)

) to handle the creation of such cells to work fine, if I understand you correctly. I’ve used a system where cellForRowAtIndexPath just makes several calls to those other functions, and while it may not be the best way to organize the code, it’s certainly a major improvement over trying to contain everything in a single function. 🙂