Chapter 12: Common UI Paradigms Using Table Views

In Chapter 6, I introduced table views and showed you how to get a good scrolling performance when you use table views. Apart from showing a list of data, table views are also used as a substitute for creating complex structured scrollable views, and in fact most of the time, table views are used as cheap substitutes for creating vertically scrollable views even if the content they display is not a list of data. For example, in the built-in contacts app, the contacts list is a UITableView, and so is the view for adding a new contact. Additionally, third-party application developers have introduced new interaction patterns, and they have been commonly used on other apps as well.

This chapter focuses on the advanced aspects of table views and shows you how to create complex (yet common) UIs such as Pull-To-Refresh and infinite scrolling lists. It also briefly explains how to use table view row animations to create accordion and options drawer (a UI that shows available toolbar elements just below the table view cell that is acted upon) and several other interesting UI paradigms.

iOS has been around for more than five years, so this chapter is based on the assumption that you’re well versed in concepts like UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource. In addition, though you don’t have to read this book sequentially, this chapter is also based on the assumption that you have read Chapter 6, which as I just mentioned, introduces ...

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