I am currently working on a photo gallery/slideshow app and one of the requirements is for the main gallery listing page to have static header and footer that shows the app name, contact information and adverts. The logical first method of attack is to just setup a UITableViewController subclass, slap some views and subviews to the table view header and footer and get on with the day. However, the table itself should scroll, but the "header" and "footer" views should remain stationary. My first approach, I found out quickly, did not work. Surprisingly, there are a lot of people having issues with custom sized uitableviews in general and the discussions that I saw online didn't provide a very straight forward solution so I decided to create one.
The first big problem that most people run into is that they can't seem to resize the uitableview no matter what frame size they set. It doesn't matter if you do it programmatically or through Interface Builder it still takes up the ENTIRE screen. That is because they have subclassed UITableViewController. To be honest I am not sure that happens "under the covers", but the custom frame sizes/locations are ignored. You must make your controller a subclass of UIViewController and then add your UITableView as a subview to the your controllers view.
For example:
At this point your frame size and height will be respected.
In my example I setup a simple UINavigationController project with two controllers. The first has a header view, footer view and uitableview. The second "detail" controller just has a UILabel with placeholder text. Everything is built programmatically so that you can adjust frames and positions easily as well as any other customizations you would like. Comments/suggestions are always appreciated.