Question

I would like to know if a cell is being dragged (via the grip on the right side when a UITableView is in editing mode). I would like to change the background while it is in that state.

Answer 1

There is no callback unfortunately, but since the default behaviour is to adjust the ‘alpha’ value of the UITableViewCell you can check for that in ‘- (void)layoutSubview’ of your UITableViewCell subclass.

- (void)layoutSubviews
{
    [super layoutSubviews];
    if (self.alpha < 0.99) {
        // we are most likely being dragged
    } else {
        // restore for not being dragged
    }
}

Note that this is a bit of a hack. I noticed that this doesn’t work when the table view’s separatorStyle is set to ‘UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone’.