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First version 09 Dec 2003
 Rule editors, like the one used in Mail, or the one used in the Find panel in Finder, are also difficult or impossible to create in the standard table view, since they require a layout that is not bound by columns of similar width, or even the same number of columns.   If the table view is so obviously not designed for these purposes, why try to use it at all? A valid question! My reason for sticking with the table view is that it provides so much functionality that would have to be duplicated if a custom class were constructed for this purpose. I'm sure that there are lots of ways you could resolve this problem. I will present you with one solution, which I currently use in my production code. The implementation presented here is slightly stripped down, to make the code easier to read. This implementation consists of only two classes, and very little code (always good). The core class is the SubviewTableViewController (STVC), which allows you to provide custom views to a standard NSTableView. The STVC sits between your controller and the designated table view. The STVC forwards all regular data source and delegate methods to your controller, and adds a couple of methods of it's own. The sample projects are using the Xcode project file format, and a couple of Panther-only features. The core code of the STVC is not using anything Panther-specific though, and these projects could very easily be made to run on any version of Mac OS X. SubviewTableViewTester Try this example first. This simple application presents a table view with progress bars, similar to a browser's download panel.  Download: SubviewTableViewTester (Xcode 1.0 format) SubviewTableViewRuleEditor The following example is a bare bones rule editor, intended to showcase a slightly more advanced example on how to use STVC.  Download: SubviewTableViewRuleEditor (Xcode 1.0 format)
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