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UIKit Apprentice

Third Edition · iOS 18 · Swift 5.10 · Xcode 16

Before You Begin

Section 0: 5 chapters
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Getting Started

Section 1: 8 chapters
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Checklists

Section 2: 12 chapters
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My Locations

Section 3: 11 chapters
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Store Search

Section 4: 13 chapters
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28. The Locations Tab
Written by Fahim Farook

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You’ve set up the data model and given the app the ability to save new locations to the data store. Next, you’ll show these saved locations in a table view in the second tab.

The completed Locations screen will look like this:

The Locations screen
The Locations screen

This chapter covers the following:

  • The locations tab: Set up the second tab to display a list of saved locations.
  • Create a custom table view cell subclass: Create a custom table view cell subclass to handle displaying location information.
  • Edit locations: Add functionality to allow editing of items in the locations list.
  • Use NSFetchedResultsController: How do you use NSFetchedResultsController to fetch data from your Core Data store?
  • Delete Locations: Add the ability to the UI to delete locations, thus removing them from the Core Data store as well.
  • Table view sections: Use built-in Core Data functionality to add the ability to display separate sections based on the location category.

The Locations tab

➤ Open the storyboard and drag a new Navigation Controller on to the canvas — it has a table view controller attached to it, which is fine. You’ll use that in a second.

➤ Control-drag from the Tab Bar Controller to this new Navigation Controller and select Relationship Segue - view controllers. This adds the navigation controller to the tab bar.

➤ The Navigation Controller now has a Tab Bar Item that is named “Item”. Rename it to Locations.

➤ Change the navigation bar of the new table view controller so that the title is set to Locations.

The storyboard now looks like this:

The storyboard after adding the Locations screen
The storyboard after adding the Locations screen

➤ Run the app and activate the Locations tab. It doesn’t show anything useful yet:

The Locations screen in the second tab
The Locations screen in the second tab

Design the table view cell

Before you can show any data in the table, you have to design the prototype cell.

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The basic table view controller

Let’s write the code for the view controller. You’ve seen table view controllers several times now, so this should be easy.

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Get Locations from data store

➤ Run the app and tag a handful of locations. If there is no data in the data store, then the app doesn’t have much to show…

Display the fetched Locations

Now that you’ve loaded the list of Location objects into an instance variable, you can change the table view’s data source methods.

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Create a custom table view cell subclass

Using viewWithTag(_:) to find the labels from the table view cell works, but it doesn’t look very object-oriented to me.

Edit locations

You will now connect the LocationsViewController to the Location Details screen, so that when you tap a row in the table, it lets you edit that location’s description and category.

Create edit segue

➤ Go to the storyboard. Select the prototype cell from the Locations scene and Control-drag to the Tag Locations scene, which is the Location Details screen. Add a Show selection segue and set its Identifier to EditLocation.

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The Any type

The type of the sender parameter is Any. You have seen this type in a few places before. What is it?

Set up the edit view controller

When editing an existing Location object, you have to do a few things differently in the LocationDetailsViewController. The title of the screen shouldn’t be “Tag Location” but “Edit Location”. You also must put the values from the existing Location object into the various cells.

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Fix the edit screen

There are two problems to solve:

Use NSFetchedResultsController

As you are no doubt aware by now, table views are everywhere in iOS apps. A lot of the time when you’re working with Core Data, you want to fetch objects from the data store and show them in a table view. And when those objects change, you want to do a live update of the table view in response, to show the changes to the user.

Organize the code using extensions

An extension lets you add code to an existing class without having to modify the original class source code. When you make an extension you say, “here are a bunch of extra methods that also need to go into that class”, and you can do that even if you didn’t write the original class to begin with.

Delete locations

Everyone makes mistakes. So, it’s likely that users will want to delete locations from their list at some point. This is a very easy feature to add: you just have to remove the Location object from the data store and the NSFetchedResultsController will make sure it gets dropped from the table — again, through its delegate methods.

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Mass editing

Many apps have an Edit button in the navigation bar that triggers a mode that also lets you delete — and sometimes move — rows. This is extremely easy to add.

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Table view sections

The Location objects have a category field. It would be nice to group the locations by category in the table. The table view supports organizing rows into sections and each of these sections can have its own header.

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27. Saving Locations
29. Maps
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