Displaying the Data

Now that you have the table view wired up to its delegate and dataSource, you're in a position to start making it do something. A logical next step would be to get the table view to display its data.

As the table view draws itself, it asks its dataSource to provide cells that can then be displayed. You'll look at this process in a lot more detail in Chapter 3, but for now let's get those cells created.

The UITableViewDataSource protocol has two required methods and nine optional ones. Because this is a simple example, you're going to implement only the two required methods and one optional one.

The first required method—tableView:numberOfRowsInSection:—returns the number of rows that the section will eventually contain. The second required method—tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:—creates and returns the cell itself.