Question

I have my uitable data being populated for the current section inside numberOfRowsInSection. I then expect it to call cellForRowAtIndexPath so that I can use that data.

In my numberOfRowsInSection I am overwriting the data from the previous section. Doing NSLog it shows that numberOfRowsInSection runs for all 149 sections before the first cellForRowAtIndexPath is called… Why?

I have removed calls to reloadData since I saw it was the issue for someone else here on stack overflow but that didn’t resolve the issue.

Per Jim I am adding what I am doing.

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{   
    NSMutableArray *tempArray = [NSMutableArray array];
    FMResultSet *appointmentResults = [[DataClass getDB] executeQuery:@"SELECT * FROM Appointments WHERE date = ?",[self.appointmentDates objectAtIndex:section]];
    int rowCount = 0;
    while ([appointmentResults next]) {
        [tempArray addObject:[appointmentResults resultDict]];
        rowCount++;
    }
    self.appointments = tempArray;
    NSLog(@"Appointments: %@ - %i", [self.appointmentDates objectAtIndex:section], rowCount);
    return rowCount;
}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    //Parse the appointments for the current section and display them
}

Answer 1

In a general sense, it’s not very good practice to rely upon Apple calling your delegate functions in any particular pattern.

With UITableView in particular, it only will request data on a need-to-know basis. The UITableView has a greater need to know how many sections and rows there are in the entire table so that it can handle things like scrolling position and scrollbar size properly, while actual cell contents can be allowed to slide until they’re about to enter the user’s view.

You can’t take a call to numberOfRowsInSection as implying anything more than that the system wants to know how many rows are in a section. 🙂