Alphabetically sectioned UITableView, NSSortPredicate Vs Array of arrays? - iphone

I have an array of simple objects. I wish to display these in a sectioned table view sorted alphabetically, the first section being "A", the second being "B", etc. The data-source of this table, i.e. the simple array, may be updated frequently (same every ten minutes).
I'm trying to figure out if its better to have an two dimensional array with each sub-array corresponding to a character in the alphabet / populating a section. Or use predicates to get the objects for each section & sort them alphabetically?
I'm leaning towards the multi-dimensional array approach as it might be less resource intensive than doing a search & sort predicate computation for each section?

Look at the UILocalizedIndexedCollation class and its associated sample codes. It is designed especially for this purpose.
You may be interested in this doc too.

Related

In What Order UITableView sections are displayed?

I am getting data from a sqlite3 database and i'm saving those things in an array and i'm using that array in viewForHeaderInSection method, every time my data will be different i mean section list will be different every time it is displaying randomly i need to display it in an order.
1. How a UITableView displays its sections(any sorting algorithm is there) or randomly it will display?
2. How can i sort my sections in an order?
Any help is thankful in advance.
The table view displays its sections in the order you tell it to. If you are populating an array for the sections from a SQL query, you can apply ordering in the query. If this is not possible, you can sort the array after population using one of the many sorting methods available on NSArray, for example sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:. See here for more:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSArray_Class/NSArray.html#//apple_ref/occ/instm/NSArray/sortedArrayUsingDescriptors:
Question is a bit unclear. Better if you can post some code. You get different data from sqlite each time into array and that data is shown in sections. So why do you need to sort sections ? Instead, sort the array according to requirement and show the sorted data in section.
Are you asking about the order of the sections or the order of the content within the sections? For example:
Section 1
Section 3
Section 2
OR
Section 1
Row 1
Row 3
Row 2
Only the order of the Rows is determined by the order of the datasource of the uitableview.
i think you are getting different unordered data form sqlite database into array.you want sort the array(arrList)data
arrList = [arrList sortedArrayUsingSelector:#selector(localizedCaseInsensitiveCompare:)];
NSLog(#"%#",arrList);

Separating UITableView data into sections from one source

I have one table in my core data source which holds some articles with NSDate's. I basically want to separate the NSManagedObject into days, so you can scroll through and separate articles by date.
What is the best way to approach this? My context is queried out in descending date order, so just need to split that up into days for the UITableView sections, rather than 1 big section.
When you load the data for your table -- whether that's using NSFetchedResultsController and Core Data, or loading a .plist file into an NSDictionary object -- you can "section" it as you like.
You'll first step through the data (e.g. use the fetchedObjects property if using NSFetchedResultsController) and determine what sections you want. Since you're wanting to split on dates, you might store cutoffs represented by NSDate objetcts in an array. You would then use this array to implement the various UITableViewDataSource methods: in numberOfSectionsInTableView: you can return the count of this array, and in sectionIndexTitlesForTableView: you can return NSString representations of those stored NSDates for the section titles.
Methods like tableView:numberOfRowsInSection: and tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: are a little trickier. You'll probably want to use another "preprocessed" data structure (perhaps a two-level array of arrays, where the inner arrays contain the entity objects you fetched), and you'll want to set up as the same time as your array of NSDate objects.

iPhone UITableView populating variable rows sections from flat array

I thought that would be very common and easy iPhone App. In the main app I connect to database, retrieve values from database (NSDate converted to NSString)n and put into single array. Then in one of the views I populate UITableView with elements from the array. UITableView is grouped (sections). I step through array to discover number of sections (change section if new day). How do I retrieve correct element of array in cellForRowAtIndexPath? IndexPath.section and IndexPath.row seem useless as row starts count from zero for each section. If number of rows in each section was the same it would have been easy:
[arryData objectAtIndex:(indexPath.row)+indexPath.section*[tblMatchesView numberOfRowsInSection:indexPath.section]];
But number of rows in each section varies... :-)
Separate your data into arrays of arrays (based on the number of different days) once you get it from the database, that'd be the simplest solution...
How about storing different date sections in different arrays? For example, you can have an array A of array. You can loop through the original arrays yourself, if you found a new day, you just create a new array and put it into the array A. And then, when you loop over the cell, you can get the section number to get the correct array and based on the row number to get the correct elemenet in the array
It doesn't have absolute cursor but you can try utilizing
UILocalizedIndexedCollation class which is used to ease the "sectioning" of your data and proving the tableView delegate functions the required data such as the index titles, etc
Here's apple documentation link for it:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/iPhone/Reference/UILocalizedIndexedCollation_Class/UILocalizedIndexedCollation.html#//apple_ref/occ/cl/UILocalizedIndexedCollation

Is it possible to get array of all index paths for the cells in a UITableView?

Is there a simple way to get array of all index paths for the cells in a UITableView?
Since you are the one that told the table view how many sections and rows per section you had, you can use that same data - or in fact even call the same methods on your data source to ask that question from elsewhere.

NSMutableSet vs NSMutableArray

What's the difference?
In my context, I need to be able to dynamically add to and remove objects. The user clicks on rows of a table that check on and off and thus add or remove the referenced object from the list.
A wild guess is that array has indexed items while set has no indexes?
An NSSet/NSMutableSet doesn't keep items in any particular order. An NSArray/NSMutableArray does store the items in a particular order. If you're building a table view, you should definitely use an array as your data source of choice.
Also, NSMutableSet makes sure that all objects are unique.
NSMutableArray goes well with UITableView since elements have index, so you can return [array count] to get number of table rows, or [array objectAtIndex:rowNumber] to easily associate element with row.
Also, according to the documentation, testing for object membership is faster with NSSets.
You can use sets as an alternative to arrays when the order of
elements isn’t important and performance in testing whether an object
is contained in the set is a consideration—while arrays are ordered,
testing for membership is slower than with sets.
Well there are 3 main differences. 1) Sets are unordered 2)Don't have an index & 3)Cannot have duplicate values where Arrays are ordered, indexed & can store duplicate values.