Question

In iOS 5, if I set allowsMultipleSelectionDuringEditing to YES on a UITableView then swipe-to-delete no longer works. The built-in Mail app supports both swipe-to-delete and multiple selections in edit mode, and I’d like to do likewise. How do I achieve this?

Answer 1

The trick is to set allowsMultipleSelectionDuringEditing to YES on entering edit mode and set it back to NO on exiting edit mode. This way, both swipe-to-delete and multiple selections in edit mode work.

If you’ve subclassed UITableViewController (which you probably have), then you can simply do this:

- (void)setEditing:(BOOL)editing animated:(BOOL)animated
{
    // Set allowsMultipleSelectionDuringEditing to YES only while
    // editing. This gives us the golden combination of swipe-to-delete
    // while out of edit mode and multiple selections while in it.
    self.tableView.allowsMultipleSelectionDuringEditing = editing;

    [super setEditing:editing animated:animated];
}