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Greetings. I need to allow the users of my app to choose one item from a list of about 50 text items (column names in an np matrix, loaded into a list). It seems that the best UI tool for this is the TableView, but after a few hours of frustration and playing with various sample code snippets I haven't managed to make this happen. The more I read, the more confused I get. I simply need to populate the TableView from the list, allow the user to choose an item, and then see what item was chosen.

I'd be most grateful for some practical help targeted at someone who isn't (yet) a master of OOP. Thanks in advance!

I'd really appreciate some help with this, folks. I'm a scientist with lots of experience with other languages, faced with serious data handling challenges with a critical time limit, having real issues adapting to Python and Pythonista. Your help and support would be enormously appreciated.

I assume that you have your data already in a list form and that you have some understanding of how pythonista UI's work, if not let me know and I will try and explain it as best I can.
The following is a brief outline of what needs to be done:

import ui
data = [x for x in range(0, 50)]
datasource = ui.ListDataSource(data)
tv = ui.TableView()
tv.data_source = datasource
tv.delegate = datasource

def selectitem(*args):
    view = ui.View(title='{}'.format(args[1]))
    label = ui.Label()
    label.text = "{}, {}, {}".format(*args)
    label.size_to_fit()
    view.add_subview(label)
    view.background_color = 'white'
    nav.push_view(view)
datasource.tableview_did_select = selectitem

nav = ui.NavigationView(tv)

nav.present()

Hope this helps.

@heliophagus , below is probably the easiest to do what you want. It uses the Pythonista dialogs module. It's worth reading. There are a number of different types of dialogs you can create. The dialogs module is just a wrapper around ui.TableView so you can make quick lists etc...
Hope this helps. It's not difficult to do with a ui.TableView, but seems like you could use a quick rest from them 😬

Edit: if dialogs is not flexible enough for your list data, let me know. Will try to help further.

import dialogs

def show_dlg(the_list):
    return dialogs.list_dialog('Please select', the_list)


lst = range(100)
res=show_dlg(lst)
print(res)

Super helpful- Thank you both! I woke up at 3 a.m. to check the forum, and found two very different answers, and both would work. The shorter, 'wrapper' approach is particularly appealing because it uses less real estate and (to me, at my present basic level of Python and Pythonista understanding) is more intuitive.

Picking an item from a scrollable pop-up list seems like a really basic action that shouldn't take more than a couple of lines of code, but then again I'm not a trained programmer, just someone who needs to get something relatively complex done on an iPad platform within a tight time-frame.

Again, thanks to both of you!