Beginning iPhone Development, Seventh Edition

Chapter    8

Introduction to Table Views

Over the course of the next few chapters, we’re going to build some hierarchical navigation-based applications similar to the Mail application that ships on iOS devices. Applications of this type, usually called master-detail applications, allow the user to drill down into nested lists of data and edit that data. But before we can build applications like that, you need to master the concept of table views. And that’s the goal of this chapter.

Table views are the most common mechanism used to display lists of data to the user. They are highly configurable objects that can be made to look practically any way you want them to look. Mail uses table views to show lists of accounts, folders, and messages; however, ...