iPhone SDK 3 Programming: Advanced Mobile Development for Apple iPhone and iPod touch

Chapter 9. Table View

A table view is an important and widely used graphical user interface object in the iPhone OS. Understanding table views is essential to writing iPhone applications. Fortunately, programming table views could not be any easier.

This chapter takes you through a step-by-step journey to the world of table views. We start by presenting an overview of the main concepts behind table views in Section 9.1. After that, we present in Section 9.2 a simple table view application and discuss the mandatory methods you need to implement in order to populate and respond to the user's interaction with the table view.

In Section 9.3, we show how easy it is to add images to table rows. Section 9.4 introduces the concept of sections and provides a table view application that has sections with section headers and footers.

In Section 9.5, we introduce the concept of editing a table view. An application that allows the user to delete rows is presented and the main ideas are clarified. In Section 9.6, we address the insertion of new rows in a table view. An application that presents a data entry view to the user and adds that new data to the table's rows is discussed. In Section 9.7, we continue our discussion of the editing mode and present an application for reordering table entries. The main concepts of reordering rows are presented.

Section 9.8 covers the mechanism for presenting hierarchical information to the user, and an application that uses table views to present three levels ...