iPhone MVC Question on table views and structuring custom class models

I have been reading a lot about MVC these days and I think I have my head around it but I would appreciate some advice and informed opinions on how to best approach my problem.

I have 3 questions really all related to the MVC design pattern.

1. In many of the examples I have encountered people have used the contoller (say of a Table view) to populate an array with objects of a custom class (say Student.h/m). But shouldn't the Student class have methods that are called that would return an array of data for the variable in the controller? Isn't that how the MVC works? That the model holds the definition of the data and takes responsibility for reading and writing it?

2. In many table view examp开发者_开发知识库les, in the various books I have read, they all say, "for convenience we are going to make the controller our delegate and data source for the table". I have yet to see an example where table view does not use the controller as a data source. How would you hook up a table view to a different data source?

3. I have 2 model classes "mission" and "airfield". Each one of these needs data from a XML file in the cloud. Do I write the parser in the mission/airfield implementation files? Do I create a separate Parser object? Should these models retun data to the controller as an array?

Whilst I understand a lot of the theory a lot of the examples I find on the web seem to break a lot of the concepts I thought I understood.

Any explanations would be most welcome. The quality of responses on this site are amazing. Thanks in advance

You seem to already have a pretty good understanding of how MVC works, so I'll just add a few comments.

1. The controller is responsible for feeding data to the view. There could be a million different states and scenarios that would affect what data to use and how, and it's not the model's job to figure that out. The model holds the data, and the controller handles the logic.

2. If you need a different delegate or data source for your table view, you can instantiate them in the table view controller, and then tell the table view about them using the delegate and dataSource properties. They need to implement the required methods of the UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource protocols.

3. Sometimes models and controllers overlap in functionality, and this is a perfect example of such a case.

   One solution could be to let the mission and airfield classes inherit from a custom class that knows how to download the required XML and set up a parser, so they just need to provide the URL and override the parser callbacks for their specific tags. Everything else related to downloading the XML could be handled in the super class.

   Another way could be to create a separate class that takes a URL and returns some XML, and then the mission and airfield classes call that method and parse the XML independently.

   The wrong way is to let both the mission and airfield classes know how to download and parse, because you'd have to maintain the code in both places.

   It's OK to have a data loading controller, that hands over the data to the view controller, so the controller code can be very specific (and maintainable).