UITableViews drive a significant portion of iOS apps. Apple has provided some pretty great tools for developing decent looking apps based on them, but there are times when you might want to do something a little more stylish than what iOS provides. That’s when you probably consider writing your own UITableViewCell subclass or at least adding a category to UITableViewCell, though I find that is probably the less appropriate option in most cases. Getting your cells to look just right can be more than a little time consuming. Luckily, there is a bit of a shortcut you can take: loading the cells from a nib.
Before I show you how to do this, you should know going in that there are some drawbacks to doing this and that this is not an appropriate solution a some cases. Loading cells from a nib is less performant than just drawing the entire thing in code. Generally, you would not want to do something like this in a resource intensive app, such as a game for example. Ok, now that we have gotten that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get back to the point:
- (id)initWithStyle:(UITableViewCellStyle)style reuseIdentifier:(NSString *)reuseIdentifier
{
self = [super initWithStyle:style reuseIdentifier:reuseIdentifier];
if (self) {
NSArray* nibContents = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"SpecialCell" owner:self options:NULL];
NSEnumerator* nibEnumerator = [nibContents objectEnumerator];
NSObject* nibObject = nil;
while ((nibObject = [nibEnumerator nextObject]) != nil) {
if ([nibObject isKindOfClass:[SpecialCell class]]) {
self = (SpecialCell *)nibObject;
break;
}
}
}
return self;
}
The above code presupposes that SpecialCell is a subclass of UITableViewCell; I omitted the header for the sake of brevity. So, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. This method is overwriting initWithStyle and yes you could write a second method rather than overwriting that one. We have the normal if (self) check that we see in inits. All pretty much standard.
Ok, so what is actually loading the nib? Well, if you look nib is being loaded and its contents are being placed in the nibContents array. Once the the contents of the nib are all in the array, an enumerator is created based on it. After that we simply loop through all of the objects, assign self the the one whose class is SpecialCell and return it.
Pretty easy, right? Just keep in mind that this can be a source of slow down on your table and may not be an appropriate solution for your app, but this can be a good time saver for prototypes or non resource intensive apps. If you have any feedback I can found Twitter or Google+.
