Question

In one of my UIViewControllers, I have a UITableView, which only has two rows and both are always visible on screen. This is a table view historically (another developer did it this way – and I’m not stuck with it). Beause both rows of the table are always visible, when my cellForRowAtIndexPath is called, I create one of the cells from a XIB and store a reference to one of the subviews (UITextView). When I need to get hold of the text from that UITextView, I simply use the local reference. This works fine – most of the times.

In one particular case, I navigate to another UIViewController from this one (using pushViewController:animated). That new view controller uses quite a bit of memory, so internally iOS deallocates the table row from the first view controller (it’s not visible any more, because another view controller is active) – and on my return to the first view controller it simply calls cellForRowAtIndexPath again. When that row gets released, naturally the reference I stored internally is no longer valid – and if I try to use it, the app crashes (“selector sent to deallocated instance”).

My question is: how can I catch when iOS internally releases the table cell so that I could set my reference to nil to be re-assigned at a later time?

Answer 1

Apparently, the only way I found to deal with this issue is to include

- (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning;

callback and set the references to nil there. Not sure if this is the best way of dealing with the situation, but it works.