viewbased

Viewbased is a term used in GUI framework design to describe a style of user interface where items in lists, tables, or collections are rendered as individual views rather than as simple, cell-rendering objects. In Apple's Cocoa framework, view-based refers specifically to NSTableView, NSOutlineView, and NSCollectionView that display content using NSView-based cells instead of the older NSCell-based approach.

Historically, macOS provided cell-based table and outline views that drew content with NSCell subclasses such as NSTextFieldCell and NSImageCell. With macOS Lion (OS X 10.7), Apple introduced view-based table and outline views, allowing each row or item to be represented by a distinct NSView. This shift enabled richer layouts and controls within each cell and simplified customization.

Implementation in a view-based context typically involves providing a view for a given row and column through a data source method such as tableView:viewForTableColumn:row:. Views are reused via a mechanism similar to cell reuse, for example by requesting a view with a particular identifier. Commonly, developers use subclasses of NSTableCellView to expose outlets (such as text fields and image views) for easy configuration.

Benefits of the view-based approach include greater flexibility for complex layouts, easier incorporation of interactive controls within cells, and more straightforward customization. It also supports performance optimizations through view reuse. Drawbacks can include higher memory usage for large numbers of visible cells and the need to migrate existing cell-based code.

Outside of Cocoa, the term viewbased is sometimes used more generally to contrast architectures that render data with dedicated views against those relying on simple, non-view renderers.