Question

Ok, so here’s the situation. I currently have a view controller called MainViewController which has a UITableView with many different cells. When I click on a cell, I want that cell to expand (grow in height) and show some “additional information”. The problem is, this additional information is very complex and can contain UILabels, other UITableViews, UIWebViews and UIImageViews. Furthermore, this “additional data” requires quite a bit of computation in order to determine what exactly to display (i.e. what the UILabels say, how large the UIImageViews are). Therefore, because of the complexity of this “additional information”, I’m at a loss as to how to design my program.

The “additional information” requires a lot of code, thus I don’t want to just throw that code into the MainViewController. Additionally, it would be nice if there was some way to use Interface Builder to design these “additional information” views graphically rather than programatically.

Currently I have each set of additional information as its own separate UIViewController (thus allowing me to have separate classes for the data and allowing me to use interface builder) and I just segue to a new screen when a cell is selected. However, I don’t want to segue to a new screen; I want all of the data that this UIView controller is showing to be shown in MainViewController. What’s the best way to do this?

In summary, I currently have one UIViewController segueing to another UIViewController; however, I want the second UIViewController’s content to be show in the first. If possible I would like to use some sort of Interface Builder and to separate out the logic for this second UIViewController into another class.

Details:
~ I’m developing for iOS 5 only and I’m using ARC.
~ I’ve never developed for iOS 4 or below before and I have never used nib files before but I would be willing to learn if required. Simple sample code would be helpful.
~ Thanks!

Answer 1

Same opinion as SmartWork.

You should create your custom UITableViewCell class with its xib file, with a UITableViewCell as main xib view

And in your tableView datasource, you can import it as below :

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"MyViewCell";
    MyViewCell *cell = (MyViewCell *)[self.tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    if (cell == nil) {
        NSArray *topLevelObjects = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"MyViewCell" owner:nil options:nil];
        for (id currentObject in topLevelObjects) {
            if ([currentObject isKindOfClass:[UITableViewCell class]]) {
                cell = (MyViewCell *)currentObject;
                break;
            }
        }
    }
    [self configureCell:cell atIndexPath:indexPath]; // your own function to customize your cell.
    return cell;
}

Then, in the cell xib, you can set the max height of the cell, and decide the effective height in the UITableViewDelegate class.