Index Path Fundamentals

If you consider the hierarchy of the hypothetical company shown in Figure 1, the root array consists of a single entry for the CEO. The array below that consists of the various vice presidents. Below each vice president is an array of directors, and so on. If you want to store the position of a particular employee on the Europe marketing team, for instance, a simple index is not enough. Instead a path through the nested arrays is necessary. In this case, Bill T. can be represented by the index path 0.0.1.1.2.

You can create an index path using from a single index or from a C-style array of NSUInteger values. Listing 1 shows how to create the index path to Bill T.

Listing 1  Creating an index path from an array

NSUInteger arrayLength = 5;

NSUInteger integerArray[] = {0,0,1,1,2};

NSIndexPath *aPath = [[NSIndexPath alloc] initWithIndexes:integerArray length:arrayLength];

You can also create an index path automatically from many of the more complex hierarchy collection classes. See the indexPath method of the NSTreeNode class for an example.

Using Index Paths

NSIndexPath provides methods for querying the elements in the path. For example, indexAtPosition: returns the index stored at the given position in the index path. You can also create new index paths by adding a new index or removing the last index. A few classes use index paths extensively to manage their contents. NSTreeController is one such example. For more information on NSTreeController and index paths, see Cocoa Bindings Programming Topics.

In iOS, UITableView and its delegate and data source use index paths to manage much of their content and to handle user interaction. To assist with this, UIKit adds programming interfaces to NSIndexPath to incorporate the rows and sections of a table view more fully into index paths. For more information, see NSIndexPath UIKit Additions. For instance, index paths are used to designate user selections using the tableView:didSelectRowAtIndexPath: delegate method.