UITableView hide sectionindex but retain sections

Question

We'd like to implement our own section index UI for UITableView.

It's clearly possible, since the contacts app does it on iPad. Is there a way of legally hiding the current section index? (I can get to the undocumented _index UIView but that's not going to cut it with Apple I suspect)

Answer 1

Does the answer to this question help?:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2643400/customizing-section-indexes-in-uitableview-in-iphone-application

Answer 2

That answer helps.

The trick here is to have

- (NSArray *)sectionIndexTitlesForTableView:(UITableView *)tableView;

return nil, while keeping implementations for the other section based data source methods:

- (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView;
- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
- (NSString *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView titleForHeaderInSection:(NSInteger)section

That seems to convince the tableview not to display a section index, but still allow navigation by index.