Customizing cells in UItableView

The post here sums up my experience in creating a custom cell in iPhone UITableView. In fact I was searching for a way to create a custom cells displaying couple of text contents and images. I tried with the default textlabel and deatailtextlabel to display text and it worked fine too. But I was fried up when I was in need for some more labels. This made me google more and finally I came up with what I wanted. Thats it for the intro.

 Here goes the flow I used..

• Add a new Objective C class with subclass of UITableViewCell to your project. Here I name the class as CustomCell.
• This automatically adds a pair of classes the .h and .m class.
• Now add new View XIB file to project. Replace the view file with UITableViewCell control from your library .
• Now set an identifier to the cell here I name it MyCell.
• Map the class identity to your objective c class you added before.

Now you can open your XIB and start designing the custom cell.Here I add a view and on that I drag and drop the needed controls from the library. 

And now map the controls, which looks like below after mapping.

Now Lets stop designing and start code. Declare the Outlets for the controls added in the custom cell class. Never forget to synthesize those in .m file as that is a standard way of coding objective c with Xcode.

So here is it our custom cell is ready to get merged with the UITableView in our project. As our first step here import the header file ("CustomCell.h") to the controller class where we have a table to which we integrate our custom cell.

Its all about the cellForRowAtIndexPath: where we actually code to merge the "MyCell" to the table, numberOfRowsInSection: were we specify the number of cells to be displayed .

Now enter the following codes to CellForRowAtIndexPath 

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section {

// Return the number of rows in the section.

return 6;

}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath

{

static NSString *CellID = @"MyCell"; //Should match the identifier of custom Cell

CustomCell *cell = (CustomCell*) [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellID];

if (cell == nil)

{

NSLog(@"New Cell Made");

NSArray *topLevelObjects = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"CustomCell" owner:nil options:nil];

for(id currentObject in topLevelObjects)

{

if([currentObject isKindOfClass:[CustomCell class]])

{

cell = (CustomCell *)currentObject;

break;

}

}

}

[[cell Name] setText:@"Head First IPhone Development"];

[[cell Author] setText:@"Tracey Pilone, Dan Pilone"];

[[cell Price] setText:@"English"];

[[cell imageView] setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"HeadFirst.jpg"]];

return cell;

}

compile and execute. The output appears as below .

 

This is all what I have done. Hope this post helped you in some ways. Keep tuned and await for my next post on 'Managing the selection of cells'. 
Thank you ...happy blogging :)