I am very new to iphone application development and am struggling to create a table view page where each row contains a left-aligned label with an editable text next to it - just like how it works in the email account details page in the settings application on my iphone.
I have been googling the subject for hours and it is now somehow clear to me that I need to add UITextFields to UITableViewCells, but it is still not at all clear to me how I make these text fields take up the right amount of space:
How do I make the text fields align above each other?
How do I make the text fields expand as far as possible to the right?
How do I prevent the text fields from hiding part of the left-aligned label?
Read the Apple Docs on Tableviews there are a number of predefined table cells. Also look at the Tableview programming Guide. Pick the one that has the font characteristics that you want and Apple will take care of it for you. Also, in the Settings app, the settings are a Grouped style.
For the look you are describing I think it is called UITableViewCellStyleSubtitle.
You need custom UITableViewCells and there are a number of ways of making them. For your purposes, any one of the techniques detailed in the Apple documentation will probably suffice.
An alternative to those approaches is in GSUtils (full disclosure: open-source library written by me), where you can use the same approach to designing your table view cells as you would design a UIView.
Related
Is there a control that can achieve the appearance that is in this image?
It looks like some special single round cornered table cell a UISlider embedded in it.
What I am wondering is it really a table cell, it seems overkill to do this. Is it possible there is something in iOS to achieve this without using an UIimage as a background.
Thanks,
-Code
Looks like a grouped table view section with one view in it. That custom table view cell in the grouped table view section looks to have a UISlider with a UILabel on either side of it.
As a general rule, you should always lean toward using the standard built in controls unless you really need a custom look.
See the third image here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/tableview_iphone/AboutTableViewsiPhone/AboutTableViewsiPhone.html
Also:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userexperience/conceptual/tableview_iphone/TableViewStyles/TableViewCharacteristics.html
From that link:
Grouped Table Views
A grouped table view also displays a list of
information, but it groups related rows in visually distinct sections.
As shown in Figure 1-4, each section has rounded corners and by
default appears against a bluish-gray background. Each section may
have text or an image for its header or footer to provide some context
or summary for the section. A grouped table works especially well for
displaying the most detailed information in a data hierarchy. It
allows you to separate details into conceptual groups and provide
contextual information to help users understand it quickly.
This question already has answers here:
How to create a UITableView with editable components?
(2 answers)
Closed 3 years ago.
I need to present the user with a screen with controls (i.e. a dialog). It will display some labels and different types of controls so that the user can do some configuration:
select a color (custom color picker)
select a line width (slider)
select one value from a list of values (UISegmentedControl?)
enable / disable one option (On/Off)
...
I am evaluating different alternatives:
Create the layout with labels and controls in InterfaceBuilder
Use a UITableView, so that each cell contains a label and its control
I like option 2 because it is similar to iPhone Settings app, and it makes the screen look organized, giving you sections, scroll..., but it is a real pain to create in code all different cell layouts, taking into account each row heights...
The solution has to be easiliy maintainable, allowing easy reuse of code, DRY (low repetition), data-driven...
Is there a recommended or standard aproach to do this?
Instead of implementing it yourself you might also like to consider some of the open source solutions. I use InAppSettingsKit in my app. There are a few minor UI glitches but it works well. I also evaluated mySettings (indeed I submitted a couple of patches) and InAppSettings.
Even if you don't use them, you might be able to crib a few ideas from them.
You can create the tableview cells in IB and then just create IBOutlets to each cell, and then return each cell in the data source method (forgotten the exact name of it, its where you normally create cells)
You could create a cell in IB for each cell or create different types of cells in IB, say one slider based cell, etc and programmatically change the text, etc.
This is staticly creating a tableview, theres an Apple guide on it somewhere.
you said it. use a UITableView and create custom UITableViewCells (probably in Interface Builder!) and add these in.
Also, as far as selecting a value from a list of values.. a drill in UITableView (embed the root UITableView in a navigation controller) with all the options and then a checkmark is probably advisable (this is how most apps handle this behavior). The On/Off button is more suited for UISegmentedControl.
There are great examples of this in this book.
Good luck.
I'm implementing a document viewer with highlighting/annotation capabilities for a custom document format on iPad. The documents are kind of long (100 to 200 pages, if printed on paper) and I've had a hard time finding the right approach. Here are the requirments:
1) Basic rich-text styling: control of left/right margins. Control of font name, size, foreground/background color, and line spacing. Bold, italics, underline, etc.
2) Selection and highlighting of arbitrary text regions (not limited to paragraph boundaries, like in Safari/UIWebView).
3) Customization of the Cut/Copy/Paste popup (UIMenuController) This is one of the essential requirements of the app.
My first implementation was based on UIWebView. I just rendered the document as HTML with CSS for text styling. But I couldn't get the kind of text selection behavior I wanted (across paragraph boundaries) and the UIMenuController can't be customized from within UIWebView.
So I started working on a javascript approach, faking the device text-selection behavior using JQuery to trap touch events and dynamically modifying the DOM to change the background color of selected regions of text. I built a fake UIMenuController control as a hidden DIV, positioning it and unhiding it whenever there was an active selection region.
Not too shabby.
The main problem is that it's SLOOOOOOOW. Scrolling through the document is nice and quick, but dynamically changing the DOM is not very snappy. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to recreate the magnifier loupe, so my fake text-selection GUI doesn't look quite the same as the native implementation. Also, I haven't yet implemented the communication bridge between the javascript layer and the objective-c layer (where the rest of the app lives), but it was shaping up to be a huge hassle.
So I've been looking at CoreText, but there are precious few examples on the web. I spent a little time with this simple little demo:
http://github.com/jonasschnelli/I7CoreTextExample/
It shows how to use CoreText to draw an NSAttributedText string into a UIView. But it has its own problems: It doesn't implement text-selection behavior, and it doesn't present a UIMenuController, so I don't have any idea how to make that happen. And, more importantly, it tries to draw the entire document all at once, with significant performance degradations for long documents. My documents can have thousands of paragraphs, and less than 1% of the document is ever on screen at a time.
On the plus side, these documents already contain precise formatting information. I know the exact page-position of every line of text, so I don't need a layout engine.
Does anyone know how to implement this sort of view using CoreText? I understand that a full-fledged implementation is overkill for a question like this, but I'm looking for a good CoreText example with a few basic requirements:
1) Precise layout & formatting control (using the formatting metrics and text styles I've already calculated).
2) Arbitrary selection of text.
3) Customization of the UIMenuController.
4) Efficient recycling of resources for off-screen objects.
I'd be happy to implement my own recycling when text elements scroll off-screen, but wouldn't that require re-implementing UIScrollView?
I'm brand-new to iPhone development, and still getting used to Objective-C, but I've been working in other languages (Java, C#, flex/actionscript, etc) for more than ten years, so I feel confident in my ability to get the work done, if only I had a better feel for the iPhone SDK and the common coding patterns for stuff like this. Is it just me, or does the SDK documentation really suck?
Anyhow, thanks for your help!
Does your document have any semantic components other than each paragraph? If you already have some concept of sections or pages, I would recommend you render each one of those as an independent tablecell. It's pretty simple to create a tablecell that makes you forget you're actually looking at a UITableView. All you would need to do is override drawRect: and setSelected: and setHighlighted: and tah dah! No More cell dividers unless you want them. Furthermore you could do some nifty things by using a tableview as your base. If you defined sections in the UITableView then you could have a nifty header that scrolls along as you're paging through your document. Another thing you could do is add a "jump to section" bar / a bookmarks menu, and that way you don't have to provide selection across the boundaries of sections.
Massive copy paste blocks would be pretty painful on the system as well. Further, if you went through the trouble to provide this content you might not want to make it too easy for someone to copy it all at once... (Can't follow this line of thought more without more specifics on your project).
If you really do want to provide the copy paste options you could add buttons to each logical page or section that immediately selects and copies the whole section for the user's convenience. (Maybe with citation associated?)
I recommend you lookup the UITableViewCell UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource in the SDK docs as those pages will significantly help if you choose to use this suggestion.
Just two random observations:
Can you afford to create a paging interface? (As opposed to “endless scrolling”.) It looks like a paging interface would be a lot easier on system resources.
The UIActionBar is actually the UIMenuController class. The interface is a bit weird, as the menu is a singleton (wtf?), but I’m sure you’ll have no trouble figuring it out.
Hope that helps.
Here's a potential solution, but I don't know if it's crazy. Since I'm still so new to iPhone development, this might be a big no-no.
Anyhow, I had the idea to render each paragraph of the document (whose dimensions I've already precisely calculated) as a cell in a UITableView. Since UITableView already has mechanisms for cell recycling, I wouldn't have to implement that from scratch, and the document could be arbitrarily long without causing resource consumption problems.
Of course, I'd want to get rid of the line separators between cells, since I want the UI to look like a document instead of a table.
Or maybe I could render each page of the document (like a typical PDF, this is a paged-document format) as a table cell, and override the cell-separator graphic to look like a page boundary...
But would it be possible to get rid of the default touch behavior within the table, and instead implement text-selection on the table cell contents? Would it be completely impossible to implement text selection that crosses paragraph boundaries (between multiple table cells)?
The UIWebView is a good choise, but we need another application to pre render the pages percisely using each font and each style sheet and store the rendring information into a database table:
chapter_id int primary key,
startlocation int,
end location int,
fontsize int (or stylesheetname string)
Using JavaScript we can calculate how many words fit in a div with out scrolling.
UIWebView is good as it provide rich content and it has selection and highlighting behavior.
Hope this helps.
I'm building a navigation controller based iPhone application and am curious how to go about building the detail view for my application. The part that's complicating my endeavor is: What UI elements/hierarchy should I employ to create a variable-height yet scrollable detail view?
A great example of my goal is an arrangement like the mobile App Store detail view. The horizontal divisions between the heading, description, screenshot, etc leads me to believe it's a table view in disguise, but that's just a guess.
Currently, I'm using a UIScrollView for my detail view, but since I can never be sure of the exact length of my incoming content, my description view ends up with either unused space or truncated text. Is there some set of elements that would be best suited for displaying this variable-height content in "blocky" format (like the example) while still maintaining overall view scroll-ability?
Thanks in advance for your assistance!
If you want to be able to easily format complex content you can use a UIWebView. What I basically do is create an HTML template and add it as a resource. At run time I load the content of this HTML doc and do string replacement to add the content I want. Within the HTML I place placeholders like
<div><!-- ARTICLE_TITLE --></div>
I don't think the App Store detail view is a UITableView. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's a subclass of UIScrollView.
To determine the size of your content, you can use NSString's sizeWithFont method.
A little late, but still relevant: The App Store broke a few weeks ago, and the "Featured" tab of the App Store was very obviously HTML without CSS applied. So, it's actually a UIWebView, or web content displayed in some fashion.
The touch-down behaviors of the iTunes app, while appearing quite similar, behave differently, in a more native fashion. I'm not convinced this app is implemented in the same way.
I'm exploring the iPhone SDK and want to create and use a UI component like the figure below. A rounded table with cells in which each cell can have some label text, maybe an input text field and an action button that would take it to the next screen. The table should not be screen filling.
But... I can't figure out how to do it or find example code. The 'Table View' always seems to result in a screen filling table and although the 'Table View Cell' looks like what I need I can't find any good examples. I'm sure it's all not that hard, but I just can't find it. Any tips, pointers are appreciated.
(This figure is just an example of the sort of UI component I'm looking for, I'm not build something related to flight tracking...)
Table like component http://gerodt.homeip.net/table_ui_component.png
Gero
Try looking at the "5_CustomTableViewCell" project of the TableViewSuite code sample from Apple. It should how to create custom subclasses of UITableViewCell.
The short answer is, as alluded to above, you'll want to subclass UITableViewCell and add your custom UI elements to it. For the example you provided, you'd want two different types of cells; one with a label (in light blue) and content (in black) for 4 of your cells, and then a more complex one with additional text on the right.
You want a Grouped style table, which has sections with rounded elements as you lay out instead of filling the screen.
You also want custom table cells, which you can search here to find example code for.
As mentioned by other answers, what you want is a grouped TableView with custom UITableViewCells. Take a look at the Table View Programming Guide, in particular this section on table view creation and this section on custom cells.