I am an occaisional cocoa programmer who needs to write an app to display a table of data. I need a push in the right direction so I can avoid blind alleys. Stock data would provide a reasonable example of what I need to do. The raw data is collected by another program and written to a file, let's say stock trading volume, open, high, low, and close price. I need to parse the input file data and display it, but also add data (columns) that are derived from the other entries (rows), like average volume and moving average close price. I need to be able to scroll through a large file, and be able to find things, like a particular date or close price greater than some value.
An NSTableView – dataSource gives my code execution control for each data item, which would allow me to calculate derived items on the fly. It also requires the most code. NSArrayController wraps up a lot of code, but I don't know if my code would get execution control to parse the input data. I'm also fuzzy on how to dictate what range of rows gets displayed (by scrolling or by searching). Core data seems to tighten things up even more, but seems geared toward data that is created, saved, and read by the application, rather than something that is saved by another application in a format that differs from what needs to be displayed.
Thanks for any guidance you may provide. Scott