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

Question

I'm using XCode 4.2 and have built my UI using Storyboards. I need to create a view that has content above and below a UITableView and I can achieve this by using a UIViewController. A UITableViewController does not let you add content above or below the table. You can use the table header/footer but that doesn't work for what I would like to achieve.

I now have a UIViewController with a UITableView embedded in it. I can adjust the height and width of the UITableView accordingly which provides me the UI layout that I am looking for.

I can customize the static cells in the UITableView but when I try to build I get the following error:

Illegal Configuration: Static table views are only valid when embedded in UITableViewController instances

My question is how are others getting around this? Creating a tableview with static cells and laying them out visually is very nice but apparently that is not allowed for some reason that I cannot understand. I can't switch to a UITableViewController because of my visual layout requirements.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can achieve this in Xcode 4.5 and later versions, assuming your app is targeted at iOS 6+.

In the Storyboard simply create a UIViewController with a View Container inside it's main view. Then hook up that View Container to a UITableViewController that contains static cells.

Just like this:

You don't need a single line of code. Just control click, drag and select embed. The view controller containment is handled for you.