Question

I am creating the cell programatically using the reuse identifier.

Note – I am not using storyboard for creating the cell

Whenever the cell is dequeued, the cell is nil, so the cell needs to be newly created using alloc, which is expensive.

EDIT (added 1 more question and corrected code)

Question

• Why does this dequeue always return nil ? How can I correct it ?
• Does dequeue work only when used along with storyboard / nib file ?

Code

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{

    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";

    UITableViewCell *cell = [self.tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];

    if(!cell) //Every time cell is nil, dequeue not working 
    {
        cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier];

    }

    return cell;
}

Answer 1

I was making a couple of mistakes:

1. I was using a subclass of UITableViewController, but was creating the tableView outside of the subclass
2. There is a tableView created in the table view controller, which is self.tableView In the tableview controller while returning the cell for index path, I was using self.tableView instead of tableView.

3. Also, ensure that the cell identifier is declared as static

   static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";
   
   UITableViewCell *cell = [self.tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
   

Since tableView and self.tableView were representing different tables, the cell was not being dequeued from the same table and hence was always nil