Question

I have a UITableViewController that is populated dynamically depending on a previous selection by the user. In some cases, the user should be able to select multiple rows in the table but in other cases he should not. I want to automatically select the first row in either case, but I have found that it only works when I have allowsMultipleSelection = YES.

The following code is called during -(void)viewDidLoad

switch(self.field)
{
    case people:
       self.options = (NSArray *)[data objectForKey:@"People"];
       self.tableView.allowsMultipleSelection = YES;
       enter code here break;
    case place:
        self.options = (NSArray *)[data objectForKey:@"Places"];
        self.tableView.allowsMultipleSelection = NO;
        break;
    case reason:
        self.options = (NSArray *)[data objectForKey:@"Reasons"];
        self.tableView.allowsMultipleSelection = NO;
        break;
}

[self.tableView reloadData];
NSIndexPath *zeroPath = [NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:0 inSection:0];
[self.tableView selectRowAtIndexPath:zeroPath animated:NO scrollPosition:UITableViewScrollPositionNone];

This works correctly for the “People” case but not for the others. I have tried setting allowMultipleSelection to YES and that solves the problem of the selection, but it is not acceptable in terms of the application logic.

Am I missing something about how these functions work? How can I programmatically select a row in a single selection table?

Answer 1

Fixed with the following from the template:

// Uncomment the following line to preserve selection between presentations.
self.clearsSelectionOnViewWillAppear = NO;

Still not sure exactly why it didn’t work before.