Comments on: Custom UITableViewCell from a XIB in Interface Builder

By: Elliot Babchick

Elliot Babchick — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:16:52 +0000

@Andrew @Urs @bdunagan

Found the problem. In the code you provide in the post you have this little booger:

UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"BDCustomCell"];

Change “UITableViewCell” to your custom cell class and cast it appropriately or do something to that effect so XCode understands those custom structures. Cheers.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:51:40 +0000

@Urs @bdunagan

So, I came back to this page for my second project to use this. After reading your comments, I realize that I had the same problem too. When I use the deprecated setText: method, the program runs with a warning. However, using the cell.labelname.text format, I get the error about labelname not being part of a structure or union.

My guess here is that “cell” is not what we think it is, although I can’t figure out how. My XIB’s File Owner is set to UIViewController, and the cell view is set to the custom class. All IBOutlets are connected properly as far as I can tell. The view for the File’s Owner is also set to the UITableViewCell.

There seems to be a missing link somewhere which I just can’t see, and that the online material I’m searching also doesn’t have an explanation for. I’ll keep looking and if I find something I’ll post it.

By: bdunagan

bdunagan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:31:49 +0000

@Urs Be sure that you declare accessors for ‘label’ in the custom cell, either via @property/@synthesize or the manual method, “- (UILabel *)label;”. Hope that helps!

By: Urs

Urs — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:49:37 +0000

I’m trying to get this to work – but when I try to access the IBOutlets I set, I get an error saying that it’s not a structure…

I user the first (View based) approach. Once I get the pointer to the cell, I try to access its outlets by using

cell.label.text = @”test”;

Where «label» is one of the outlets…

Everything is set up as you describe and it’s perfectly working up to the issue with the outlets…

Any idea?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 23:53:32 +0000

Wow, there are some other suggestions on how to make this happen, but this one is the simplest and works well. Not sure if using the UIViewController is the standard method but it sure seems to work well. I was pretty frustrated with this, but 5 minutes after reading this example, everything came together.

Thanks for the tutorial. It’s still helping out a year after being written!

By: Mahboud

Mahboud — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:32:40 +0000

Or you can instantiate this way (using an IBOutlet):

HighScoresTableCell *cell = (HighScoresTableCell *) [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
if (cell == nil) {
// refresh the outlet
[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@”HighScoresTableCell” owner:self options:nil];
cell = highScoresTableCell; // get the object from the outlet
highScoresTableCell = nil; // make sure this can’t be re-used accidentally
}

// Set up the cell…

By: bdunagan

bdunagan — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:20:09 +0000

Great! Glad it worked for you. It’s true that it doesn’t reuse the cells until an existing one goes off the screen and a new one is needed. That confused me at first as well. And thanks for the link; much more detail in that post.

By: haiku

haiku — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:02:17 +0000

hmm. tried to put a link in that last post: “http://humblecoder.blogspot.com/2009/05/iphone-tutorial-creating-table-cells-in.html” perhaps?

By: haiku

haiku — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:01:48 +0000

Ah! indicates that there is no re-use until there is one for every visible row in the table! very good.

By: haiku

haiku — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:55:18 +0000

I think that if you set a breakpoint you will find that your cell is not actually being reused in either case. At least they do not seem to be in the tests I’ve done. Most sample code that is doing this on the net is reloading the cell from the nib/xib file every time because the dequeue cell command is failing even though the cell has a reuseIdentifier (which is supposed to trigger it to be reused). They are not getting added to the _reusableTableCells dictionary in the table view for some reason.

If you can confirm that your solution doesn’t have this problem, I’d be interested to hear that.