iOS 6 Foundations

chapter twelve

Exploring the Table View in the Template

You have seen many of the basics of app development on iOS. For most apps, the heart of the app is its interface, and you have seen how to use storyboards to create the interface. When it comes to the data that is displayed and manipulated in the interface, you have seen how to use a Core Data model to organize the data. Xcode provides tools to convert a graphically created data model into code in subclasses of NSManagedObject. The basics of view controllers and views were demonstrated in the master and detail view controllers described in the previous part. And, of course, the key aspect of saving and restoring data has also been addressed.

There’s much, much more to iOS, and this part of the book shows you one of the most important sets of frameworks, classes, and tools—table views. At first, the whole idea of using table views may seem very specific and not really a major part of iOS development. Tables, after all, are just ways of formatting data—aren’t they? You can manage tables with a word processor (Pages or Microsoft Word, for example). If you want to do sophisticated things with tables, Numbers, Excel, Bento, or FileMaker let you do what you need to do.

In this chapter, you see table views in action and learn about their basic components. Following that, there is a high-level description of how the concepts work together with table views. Unlike most of the other chapters in this book, this chapter is primarily ...