objective c - Drill down hierarchical data with UITableView

Question

I want to build an app to navigate a data hierarchy. The structure of this hierarchy is something like the one I'm showing in the following image. A branch of the structure could have more levels than the others.

I would like to drill-down this structure with TableViews like this:

    A > AA > AAB > AABA

or

    A > AB > ABA

What I would like to know is if I can have only one TableViewController in my storyboard and reuse it to display each new level of data? I don't want to have a bunch of tableviewcontrollers linked together in my storyboard because I am not sure if I will have a hierarchy of 3, 4, or 100 levels.

Answer 1

To recurse to arbitrary depth with only a single VC painted in storyboard, use storyboard to paint the top level: a navigation controller with a table view controller at it's root. The table vc should be a UITableView subclass, and have a storyboard identifier in storyboard (say, "MyCustomTableVC").

Give MyCustomTableVC a public property (say, ModelItem *node) that indicates which node in your model it should present.

Instead of storyboard segues, when the table vc gets didSelectRowAtIndexPath, have it create another instance of itself...

UIStoryboard *mainStoryboard = [UIStoryboard storyboardWithName:@"MainStoryboard"
                                                         bundle: nil];
// Imagine it's called MyCustomTableVC
MyCustomTableVC *newVC = (MyCustomTableVC*)[mainStoryboard 
                    instantiateViewControllerWithIdentifier: @"MyCustomTableVC"];

Set the newVC model node to the selected item (the item in your model at indexPath.row), and then push to it...

// making up a lot of stuff about your model here, but hopefully you get the idea...
newVC.node = [self.model objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];
[self.navigationController pushViewController:newVC animated:YES];

This approach has the benefit of getting all the navigation controller behavior: animated pushes and pops, back buttons, etc.