Question

I’m adding items (e.g. gesture recognizers, subviews) to cells in cellForRowIndexPath. I don’t want to add these if the cell is being reused (presumably) so is there a way of easily telling if the cell is new, or is being reused?

The cell prototype is defined in a storyboard.

I’m not using a custom subclass for the cell (seems like overkill). I’m using the cell tag to identify subviews, so can’t use that.

I could use the pre-iOS 6 approach, but surely there’s a better way to do something so simple?

I couldn’t find anything online, so afraid I may be confused about something – but it’s a hard thing to search for.

Answer 1

The simplest way to tackle this is to check for the existence of the things you need to add.

So let’s say your cell needs to have a subview with the tag 42 if it’s not already present.

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"Cell"];
    UIView *subview = [cell viewWithTag:42];
    if (!subview) {
       ... Set up the new cell
    }
    else {
       ... Reuse the cell
    }
    return cell;
}