Using the UITableView, Part 1

I approached the UITableView for iPhone development with some trepidation. It looked pretty complicated to get up and running--I assumed I would be spending a significant amount of time getting it working. To my surprise, I found adding this to my app, configuring it, and adding functionality to it have been remarkably easy.

If you are a novice, you may still be learning to get a view transition to occur when a UITableItem is clicked. Here is code that you need in the tableView:didSelectRowAtIndexPath: method. This assumes you have a NIB named "PageTwo" and that its class is named pageTwo.


- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {

pageTwo *anotherViewController = [[pageTwo alloc] initWithNibName:@"PageTwo" bundle:nil];
[self.navigationController pushViewController:anotherViewController animated:YES];
[anotherViewController release];
}


Now you can transition to a new page, any new page, when a record in the UITableView is selected. Note that this can be animated, so you immediately get the great sliding animation effects standard in all iPhone apps.

Consider adding buttons to the Navigation bar at the top. I found some complicated examples of this, but Apple provided some good direction to keep this simple. This is all I needed to do to provide a button on the right side of a Navigation bar. I put this code in my viewDidLoad method:


UIBarButtonItem *addButton = [[UIBarButtonItem alloc] initWithTitle:@"Button" style:UIBarButtonItemStyleBordered target:self action:@selector(myFunction:)];
self.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem = addButton;
[addButton release];



For my next trick, I will demonstrate how to use your controller class as a delegate for the UITableView, so your class can respond to calls from the UITableView, allowing you to populate the class on the fly. See you next time!

John