When I Remember To Write It Down

I found an awesome tip at NSScreencast this week. Watch the video “Class Introspection” here.

Define an enum like so:

enum {
    SomeViewControllerFeaturedTableViewSection = 0,
    SomeViewControllerMainTableViewSection,
    ...
    SomeViewControllerTableViewSectionCount
}

Ben from NSScreencast points out that the last value becomes a natural section count. So you can easily do:

- (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView {
    return SomeViewControllerTableViewSectionCount;
}

And in the other delegate methods, something like this:

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    if (indexPath.section == SomeViewControllerFeaturedTableViewSection) {
        // make and configure a "featured" cell
        return cell;
    }

    if (indexPath.section == SomeViewControllerMainTableViewSection) {
        // make and configure a "main" cell
        return cell;
    }

    ...
}

Now you can simply move around the enum values to temporarily enable or disable sections:

enum {
    SomeViewControllerFeaturedTableViewSection = 0,
    SomeViewControllerTableViewSectionCount, // 1
    SomeViewControllerMainTableViewSection, // 2 (because the count is 1, this will never appear)
}

I really like this trick and plan on using it often. Thanks again to NSScreencast for the idea.