Populating dynamic lists, best practice

[AeornFlippout]

Hey all, I'm wondering if anyone has a system for populating lists of data into object instances in UIGrid or UITables?

What I've been doing is something like:
- Make an object a child of a UIGrid/UITable.
- On launch, save a reference to this object as a "prefab", and unparent/hide it.
- Write some code to manually instance this prefab for every item I want in my list.
- Write some code to find the various labels, icon textures, etc. and stuff the values into it.

This seems to work alright, but it feels like there's probably a generic way to handle this?
Maybe there's something built into NGUI that I've missed?

[ArenMook]

Make a real prefab out of it. That's what I do everywhere. Instantiation script references the actual prefab.

[AeornFlippout]

That's probably good advice; however it doesn't really help with how to actually populate the list with dynamic data.

I'm putting together a helper class for this purpose that I think might be useful for folks. It's not totally complete yet, but here's what I've got so far. Feel free to use it however you'd like:

http://pastebin.com/Y95SVbXT

Here's how it works:

1. attach an NGUI_ListPopulator component to an object that also has a UIGrid or a UITable on it.
2. Setup an item as a child to act as the list item template, and setup your list of keys in the populator's Item Lookup array.
 For instance, if you have a "name" label element in your list item template, add a reference to this with the id "name"
3. Now all your code needs to do is find a reference to the ListPopulator, and pass a list of Hashtables in with the list item data. The populator will take care of instancing objects and assigning your data to the various sub-objects in each list item.

It probably also wouldn't be hard to make a subclass that grabbed the data directly from a json feed or something, for things like highscores etc.

This just seemed a lot nicer to me than having to manually instance every item in a list, when they're all mostly identical.

-Aaron