iPhone Table View Data Edit Pane

Question

I have an application I'm working on, and I need the user to be able to add new "Shows", "Movements" and "Dots." These are all represented by classes. At the root of the application, all the shows are shown, the user can click on the show, see the movement in that show, then tap on a movement and see the dots in the movement. It works beautifully.

Now, I need the user to be able to add and edit these instances of these classes. The way I am thinking this will work is when the user clicks on the "Add Show" button (Or the "Add Movement", etc) a new view will be pushed onto the Navigation Controller. This works. When the button is pressed, a new instance of the show class is created, and passed to the new view controller. This also works. If the user wants to edit the show, then they will hit the edit button for the row, and the instance of the class (which already exists) will be passed to new view controller, and the user will be able to edit it (It should use the same view controller for adding and editing)

My question is, in the examples I have seen, it is always really dirty to create the editing view. The edit view is a table view with each row having some sort of control. Usually it is a UITextField, but it may be a slider, and it may be one where another view is popped, and the user needs to check one value. (This is similar to the address book application when adding and editing a contact)

Is there any way that is cleaner than just manually going in and creating a bunch of arrays to hold what custom table view cells need to be at what row? This gets very messy, very fast. I can do it this way, I just was wondering if there is a better, possibly faster way.

Answer 1

as far as i know, editing mode is the only way to make the changes you describe (if i understood correctly). I agree that it doesn't seem like the most elegant approach. http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/TableView_iPhone/ManageInsertDeleteRow/ManageInsertDeleteRow.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007451-CH10-SW19

Answer 2

To my knowledge there's no structural solution to solve this. I'm afraid managing the cells with child UITextField or other controls yourself is the only method. This indeed gets dirty and painful very fast, I certainly feel your pain.

Although it doesn't exist, it would be very convenient if Apple added out of the box editing cells to the SDK, similar to the different normal cell styles. I haven't come across an open source project that addresses this issue, but it might exist.

If you do find a better/cleaner method to handle these situations, be sure to ping back.