What's the best way for developing a large amount of data in a Table View?

Question

I'm a newbie to app development. I'm using Xcode 4.3.2. I'm attempting to develop an app using a tab bar with a table view. In the table view I need to list about 100 cities and info about those 100 cities when the user selects one. Basically, I already have that data about the cities in a Excel spreadsheet. I can't really find good examples of what I want to achieve. I've heard the terms parsing XML, SQLite, Core Data, database, etc, and I'm not sure if that is what I need to do. I'd thankfully accept any suggestions.

Answer 1

If the data in the table are changing or edited, then by using a database, you will avoid rolling a new patch with those minor changes (you just change the values in the db)

If the data is the same and won't change for a long time and you plan to patch the application, then you just need a source for that data (the spreadsheet)

For parsing the data, you can use anything, when taking about showing 100 cities, it depends how big the total data you will be querying, how fast it needs to be and you just need to benchmark it.

If you are querying about 500k records and you need to do some 'figuring out' and it takes too long to load. Then, transforming your data into xml then parsing it may give you better performance.

You have to at least design your way into what you want to achieve. Check the performance and tweak it to find the decent spot.

Right now I look at it as tackling an unknown problem. Spend some time and build something. This will help you see the potential problems better.

Answer 2

While databases are good, for a few hundred elements you can tolerate inefficiency. If your existing data are in an Excel spreadsheet, the easiest way to get them into your app is to export the Excel spreadsheet to Comma-Separated-Values (CSV), then make your app read CSV files. (If your Excel spreadsheet has multiple worksheets, you'll need to convert each separately.)

How do you parse CSV? See iPhone: How to convert CSV format into NSData or NSString?

You'll end up with arrays of arrays of NSString. You'll probably need to define a new class for your city data, and convert each row in the imported data to one city element.

If you need to know more, posting a few rows from your spreadsheet may help.