How do I reduce the height of a TableView when it is constructed in IB?

Question

I wanted to add a view to the bottom of my screen. The controller is a UITableViewController, how do I shrink the tableView and add a extra view at the bottom of the tableview?

I've tried setting the frame of self.tableView in different places (viewDidLoad, viewWillAppear etc) but nothing happens. The tableView is created by IB and not programtically.

I've tried added a footer to my table view but that's not what I want, because the footer actually scrolls up, I want a static non moving View at the bottom of the screen.

Answer 1

you want to change the -loadView method. Not viewDidLoad or viewWillAppear. This will allow you to make additional configurations with your tableview even if it is created in IB.

- (void)loadView {
[super loadView];
CGRect titleRect = CGRectMake(0, 0, 300, 40);
UILabel *tableTitle = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:titleRect];
tableTitle.textColor = [UIColor blueColor];
tableTitle.backgroundColor = [self.tableView backgroundColor];
tableTitle.opaque = YES;
tableTitle.font = [UIFont boldSystemFontOfSize:18];
tableTitle.text = [curTrail objectForKey:@"Name"];
self.tableView.tableHeaderView = tableTitle;
[self.tableView reloadData];
[tableTitle release];
}

Answer 2

I'm not saying you can't do it otherwise, but you may not want a UITableViewController for this situation. You can still have your view controller implement UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource, but place a vanilla UIView in your nib, into which you place a UITableView. Then just make sure to set the view outlet to the UIView containing your table. This has the effect of allowing you to create your additional view within IB. I just tried this and it appeared to work.

Answer 3

I don't know how to do it in IB but the way to do it in code is with this:

    - (void) loadView
    {
       UITableView *tv = [[UITableView alloc] initWithFrame: rect 
style: UITableViewStyleGrouped];
       // finishg configuring table view 
       self.view = tv;
       [tv release];
    }

Trying to do it in two stages -- style first and then frame or frame first and then style -- neither of them works.

Answer 4

I'm guessing you're using a UINavigationController. When you push a controller onto your navigation stack, UINavigationController resizes its view to full screen, ignoring the geometry and autoresizing behavior you've defined in IB.

This resizing seems to happen after viewWillAppear:. In the past I've had some success resizing a table view and adding a sibling view in viewDidAppear:, after calling [super viewDidAppear:]. This is a bit risky though, since Apple could break it by changing how UINavigationController works behind the scenes.

A safer option is to push a view controller onto your navigation stack that controls a wrapper view. Then add your UITableView and its sibling as subviews of that wrapper view. The annoying thing about this option is that you'll probably want to use a nested UITableViewController to manage your non-full screen table view, but the documentation for UIViewController says it's designed to manage full screen views only. If you decide to ignore this admonition and nest your view controllers anyway, you'll find that viewWill/DidAppear/Disappear don't get called on the nested controller, so you'll have to manually delegate those methods from your wrapper view controller. This lack of support for nested controllers is one of my biggest pet peeves about UIKit, and I've gone to great lengths to engineer around it.

If you want to toe the line and use view controllers only for full screen views, you can push a normal view controller that controls your full screen wrapper view, manually implement all the UITableViewDataSource and UITableViewDelegate methods in your view controller, and set it as the delegate for your table view.