Changing a Table View Controller to a View Controller

Question

I have a Table View Controller that displays information using JSON. I want to change the styling of my app, and I don't want it to have that "table" view that it has now. Whats the easiest way to change my Table View Controller to a regular View Controller, the biggest problem I have is that the code uses a tableView and I dont know how to get it to work as a regular view controller.

I using a Storyboard with a TableViewController thats linked to a controller called UpcomingReleasesViewController.

I want my app:

To look like this:

Answer 1

My original answer was assuming you just wanted to convert from a UITableViewController to a UIViewController . Looking at your screen snapshots, I infer you really want to switch from a UITableViewController to a UICollectionViewController (which is an iOS 6 feature than allows you to do precisely what you want).

In that case, change your base class to UICollectionViewController , and replace your UITableViewDataSource methods with UICollectionViewDataSource methods. And then redesign your scene using a Collection View Controller.

See the Collection View Programming Guide for more information. Or see WWDC 2012 sessions Introducing Collection Views or Advanced Collection Views and Building Custom Layouts .

If you need to support iOS versions prior to 6, then you have to do this collection view style coding yourself manually, putting your image views on a scroll view and using a standard UIViewController . It require more effort than using a collection view, but can be done.

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Original answer:

If this view controller will have a table view on it, but you just want to add more controls to the scene? If so, just change the view controller's base class from UITableViewController to UIViewController , create the new scene, add a table view to it, and specify the table view's delegate and data source to be the view controller:

Also, make sure you define an IBOutlet for your table view (and if you call it tableView , that will minimize any coding changes needed).

If you do that, you can quickly convert a UITableViewController based controller to a UIViewController with minimal code changes.

Answer 2

If you're looking to make something like your new UI mockup, look into UICollectionView . You'll see many of the same concepts (ie dataSource, delegate method signatures are similar) that are used in UITableViews used in the collectionView API.