Managing multiple views and interactions

Question

I have a table that contains 4 varying types of data and depending on the type of data that is selected by the user, a specific edit view is shown. One of these views has one edit field, a second one has 2 edit fields, a third one uses a picker, and so on. What's the best way to handle these varying views without an explosion of classes and without too 'switch'ing to figure out which data I'm working with?

One way I can think of is to have 4 different view controllers with respective views and then launch each one when the specific item is selected in the table but is there another elegant way to do this?

Answer 1

You can either go with the four different view controllers, or have one view controller that accepts an argument in the initialization for which content to create. The second approach seems to work better when the views are very similar (different numbers of the same controls, etc.)
For your case, some views have pickers, some have text fields... It seems that it might be best just to create a different view controller for each. With this you get added flexibility down the road, even though there is slightly more code to maintain.