Programming iOS 11

Chapter 8. Table Views and Collection Views

I’m gonna ask you the three big questions. — Go ahead. — Who made you? — You did. — Who owns the biggest piece of you? — You do. — What would happen if I dropped you? — I’d go right down the drain.

Dialogue by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Pat and Mike

A table view (UITableView) is a vertically scrolling UIScrollView (Chapter 7) containing a single column of rectangular cells. Each cell is a UITableViewCell, a UIView subclass. A table view has three main purposes:

Information

The cells constitute a list, which will often be text. The cells are usually quite small, in order to maximize the quantity appearing on the screen at once, so the information may be condensed, truncated, or summarized.

Choice

The cells may represent choices. The user chooses by tapping a cell, which selects the cell; the app responds appropriately to that choice.

Navigation

The response to the user’s choosing a cell might be navigation to another interface.

An extremely common configuration is a master–detail interface, a navigation interface where the master view is a table view (Chapter 6): the user taps a table view cell to navigate to the details about that cell. This is one reason why the information in a table view cell can be a summary: to see the full information, the user can ask for the detail view.

In addition to its column of cells, a table view can have a number of other features:

• A table can include a header view at the top and a footer ...