Using Interface Builder for UITableViews

Question

I'm very early in the iPhone development learning process. I'm trying to get my head around various pieces. Right now I've just taken the basic NavigationController template and I'm trying to create a simple grouped table view with a couple of text fields. What I can't seem to do is to get Interface Builder to allow me to drop a UITableViewCell into a UITableView so that I can then add a text field to the Cell. Is this even possible (it would seem that its supposed to be given the fact that UITableViewCell is a draggable control)?

If not, does that mean all of that is code I will need to just write myself?

Answer 1

You can create the cell with Interface Builder, but you have to make it a top-level object, rather than a child of the table view. Then you can return this cell in your view controller's tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: function.

Make sure to give the cell an identifier in Interface Builder and then use the same identifier with dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier: (see the sample code for how this works -- the idea is that cells get re-used - the OS will only allocate as many cells as fit on the screen at once. Clever way to save memory.)