Question

I am looking to return a number of custom UITableViewCells depending on the type of object I get back from my savedGames array stored in my dataModel. My question is, am I going about this the right way? I have not done this before and just wanted to make sure I was on the right track an not missing something obvious.

Note: new cells are alloc-ed and init-ed elsewhere, that is why that is not shown in the code below.

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    NSUInteger row = [indexPath row];
    SharedDataModel *dataModel = [SharedDataModel sharedInstance];
    id genericGameAtRow = [[dataModel savedGames] objectAtIndex:row];

    if([genericGameAtRow isMemberOfClass:[GameZoneOne class]]) {
        CellZoneOne *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"ZONEONE_ID"];
        return cell;
    }

    if([genericGameAtRow isMemberOfClass:[GameZoneTwo class]]) {
        CellZoneTwo *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"ZONETWO_ID"];
        return cell;
    }
    return nil;
}

EDIT: Quick question is returning nil at the bottom useful, I know it avoids the method not having a return value, but if none of the “if”s fire your going to get a “Must return a cell” error. Obviously its important to cover all the possible options, but would the final return not be better to return a default (vanilla) UITableViewCell instead? … just curious.

Answer 1

Yes this is a correct solution.

Personally I would stay away from -[id<NSObject> isKindOfClass:], since it generally is a sign of bad architecture. Instead I would have added a gameZone property to all possible classes in the savedGames array. And explicitly asked for it’s zone/type.