iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

UITableView’s Data Source

The process of providing a UITableView with rows in Cocoa Touch is different from the typical procedural programming task. In a procedural design, you tell the table view what it should display. In Cocoa Touch, the table view asks another object – its dataSource – what it should display. In our case, the ItemsViewController is the data source, so it needs a way to store item data.

In Chapter 2, you used an NSMutableArray to store BNRItem instances. You will do the same thing in this chapter, but with a little twist. The NSMutableArray that holds the BNRItem instances will be abstracted into another object – a BNRItemStore (Figure 9.6).

Figure 9.6  Homepwner object diagram

If an object wants to see all of the items, ...