Ios – How to visually create and use static cells in a UITableView embedded in a UIViewController

Views and controllers are separate things. You can have a hierarchy of view controllers and a hierarchy of views. But they're not interleaved, as the title of posts suggests (I know, Interface Builder displays them as a single hierarchy, but views and controllers are more like two parallel hierarchies).

Anyway, you can easily have a view controller set up whatever views you want in code. Override the loadView method, create a view that you assign to self.view, then add subviews to that view.

For example:

- (void)loadView
{
    UIView *view = [[[UIView alloc] init] autorelease];
    UITableView *tableView = [[[UITableView alloc] init] autorelease];
    tableView.dataSource = self;
    tableView.delegate = self;
    [view addSubview:tableView];
    self.view = view;
}

Your view controller should either inherit UITableViewController or implement the UITableViewDataSource and UITableViewDelegate protocols.

Don't implement any of the methods below when you use the static table view:

- (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView
{
}

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
}