[riveralabs]

I think 40 lines of code for a controller is overkill. The goal is to make them manageable without sacrificing readability. In my opinion the data source and the delegates should be in the controller because it makes the code easier to read.

My average controller is between 200 and 400 lines of code. This might be a lot of code in Rails of other frameworks but I find it acceptable in Objective-C (considering it's an extremely verbose language).

To reduce the lines of code in my controllers I usually use categories or subclasses for custom views (I don't use Interface Builder). You can also make manager objects to do most of the workload and reduce the lines of code per method. I think reducing the lines of code per method is more important than reducing the lines of code overall.

Things that I configure once and don't plan to touch again I put in separate files like subclasses or categories. Things that can change or are necessary for understanding the big picture stay in the controller. And guess what? Data Sources and Delegate Methods are necessary for understanding how a UITableView works. In my case 200 to 400 lines of code (on average) seems like a good compromise.