How can I centralize cellForRowAtIndexPath? - iphone

Question

I'm looking to have a single - (UITableViewCell *)cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath method that all UITableView's will use for formatting, etc.
What is the best way to accomplish this?
Right now I'm thinking I could use a separate class or put delegate methods in my app delegate and hook the UITableView's file's owner to that. But then I'd have to provide those classes/methods access to the data that would normally otherwise be right in the ViewController subclass.
How have others accomplished this sort of thing?
EDIT: To clarify, I'm not looking for a way to return a common cell itself, but rather a way to have a single cellForRowAtIndexPath method in my entire app.

Answer 1

If you just want to centralize all of the formatting but have the data sources separate in each class you could create a factory class for your table view cells which provides a method
+ (UITableViewCell* ) tableViewCellForTableView:(UITableView *)tableView withType:(int)type;
By creating type costants which get passed in, you can create a set of basic table view cells that can then be returned by this class. It is important to pass in the tableView to make use of reusable cells. A cellForRowAtIndexPath could now fetch cells from there and configure them depending on the data
- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView
cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
UITableViewCell *cell = [MyCellFactory tableViewCellForTableView:tableView withType:kMyTypePlain];
cell.textLabel.text = ....;
}

Answer 2

You may consider using an objective-c category on your ViewController which implements the cellForRowAtIndexPath method.
If you're doing something very complex in this method however, I suggest you just create a nib file which contains your cell and then load it in cellFoRowAtIndexPath. You could even create a class that inherits from UITableViewCell and stick your own methods/properties in there. I highly recommend this approach.
You can load the nib, say "MyCustomTableCell.nib" which contains your customised UITableViewCell like so:
NSArray *topLevelObjects = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:#"MyCustomTableCell"
owner:self
options:nil];
MyCustomTableCell* cell = [topLevelObjects objectAtIndex:0];

Answer 3

I think you can use the answer from #TriPhoenix for most of this.
The only additional thing I would add is that you could potentially send the data along with the call to the factory.
[MyCellFactory cellForTableView:tableView withType:kMyTypePlain data:data];
You would of course have to ensure that the data responds to a common interface to ensure that you can set things easily e.g. making sure each object responds to a similar method like
cell.textLabel.text = data.textLabelText;
You could do this using a protocol if you like. It's up to you how you structure your data.