UITableView don't reuse cells, good case to do this?

Question

I have 5 cells in a UITableView. Each has a UITextField as a subview, where the user will input data. If I DO use cell reuse, the textfield gets cleared if the cells are scrolled out of view. I don't want to have to deal with this. Is there a way to NOT reuse cells so that I don't have this issue, if so, how?

Is this a bad idea?

Your choice to reuse or not won't stop the iOS from removing cells from the table and potentially releasing them. Maybe the iOS won't remove a cell as long as it has/is the first responder (e.g. While editing the text field) — Kris Van Bael, Jun 29 '11 at 05:36
Kris - This is good to know. So, I really need to store my users input into an array or something so that I can put it back into the textfield when the cell scrolls back in... — Nic Hubbard, Jun 29 '11 at 05:40
That would definitely be safer. It could be that you can avoid an unload just by retaining your own cellviews, e.g. In an array. — Kris Van Bael, Jun 29 '11 at 05:44

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 29 '11 at 05:44

I have same feature in one of my apps and I used below code to accomplish that and I never had this kind of problem.

First of all you need to store all your textField value temporary in Array. Make array like this.

arrTemp=[[NSMutableArray alloc]initWithObjects:[NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],
         [NSString stringWithFormat:@""],nil];

Then Give all textField tag = indexPath.row;

After that You need to replace textField value in below two methods.

-(BOOL)textFieldShouldReturn:(UITextField *)textField{
   [arrTemp replaceObjectAtIndex:textField.tag withObject:textField.text];
}

-(void)textFieldDidEndEditing:(UITextField *)textField{
[arrTemp replaceObjectAtIndex:textField.tag withObject:textField.text];
}

At Last You need to set that value in cellForRowAtIndexPath datasource Method. So that whenever user scroll tableview it set previous value from temp array. Like this.

cell.txtEntry.text = [arrTemp objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];

It might possible I forgot some of the code to paste here. So if you have any problem please let me know.

`[NSString stringWithFormat:@""]` is very curious. If your goal is to get an empty `NSString`, Why wouldn't you just use `@""` directly, or `[NSString string]`? — Alexander, Sep 22 '21 at 17:08

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 29 '11 at 05:21

You can give each cell a unique ReuseIdentifier, maybe by appending the indexPath.row to the name. If you have only 5 cells, this will probably be fine, but you're losing one of the main benefits of a UITableView. In this case, you may want to use a UIScrollView instead.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 23 '13 at 19:39

If you open up Apple's Recipes sample application, you will see how Apple uses a xib file to load UITableViewCells.

In the IngredientDetailViewController file:

@property (nonatomic, assign) IBOutlet EditingTableViewCell *editingTableViewCell;
// ...
[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"EditingTableViewCell" owner:self options:nil];
// this will cause the IBOutlet to be connected, and you can now use self.editingTableViewCell

Although it looks like they are reusing the cell, you could use the same method to load the 5 cells into 5 separate IBOutlets, and then in cellForRowAtIndexPath, you just return those 5 rather than calling the dequeue method.

Note: you will probably need to store the cells as strong properties (rather than assigning them).

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 29 '11 at 05:54

0

I would say 5 textview's is a perfect case for not queueing and de-queueing the cells, just create them all in view did load, store in an array and return as requested.

answered Jun 29 '11 at 05:54

Grady Player

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UITableView don't reuse cells, good case to do this?

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