How to set static grouped TableView cell's width

Question

I am relatively new to Xcode and Swift development and I have a question regarding a UITableViewController with static, grouped cells (on iPad). I want a natural solution to make the cell width not as big as the whole screen. I have tried this:

override func viewDidAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
        tableView.frame = CGRect(x: 175, y: 70, width: view.bounds.width-350, height: view.bounds.height)
}

Problem is that this looks really nasty and gets tricky with navigationbars and tabbars at the top and bottom, but especailly doesn't work properly because it is set at viewDidAppear , so when using the swipe back gesture (like in Settings), the view still appears at full width for a second.

Do you know some other way to solve this issue? Maybe some autolayout stuff, i don't know, I've tried everything I know...

Any help will be appreciated! Thank you!

Answer 1

As you say, autolayout is probably the way to go. If you are using Interface Builder, then you can just set your constraints there. Plenty of information out there to help with that. Here's a good place to start: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AutolayoutPG/WorkingwithConstraintsinInterfaceBuidler.html

You should switch to using a regular UIViewController and manually add a UITableView as a subview of the root view. You'll also have to manually set the view controller as the delegate and dataSource of the table view. Then you'll be able to position the table view wherever you like. Unfortunately, you won't be able have static cells - but setting your data dynamically tends to be a better choice in the long run anyway.

The other way to achieve what you want and still use a UITableViewController is by setting it as a child view controller, but this is more fiddly and tends to be more restrictive in my experience.

If you want to manually set frames as in your code example, then you should do that inside the viewDidLayoutSubviews method.