Question

In the interface designer, I have a very simple setup. The main view (which is a table cell view) has four sub-views, all siblings: UIImageView and three UILabels. I’m using UIImageView to display the background of the table row. I set it so that UIImageView is at the very back of the z-index tree and set its alpha to 0.2 to dim the image – and UILabel’s are going over it.

If I set the image into the imageview at the design time in interface designer, then everything is fine, however if I set the image into the imageview at design time (I receive the actual image from the server), then the imageview alpha setting is ignored, the image is displayed at alpha = 1 and the uiimageview is displayed over all the labels. I even tried to use [parent sendSubviewToBack:imageView] but it didn’t help.

What am I missing? Here’s my whole code for displaying the table row.

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {

    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";

    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    if (cell == nil) {
        cell = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"OOItemInfoCell" owner:self options:nil] lastObject];
        cell.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator;
    }

    OOXMLNode *infoNode = [searchItemList objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];
    [(UILabel *)[cell viewWithTag:2] setText:[itemNode elementNodeWithKey:@"title"].value];
    [(UILabel *)[cell viewWithTag:3] setText:[itemNode elementNodeWithKey:@"intro"].value];
    [(UILabel *)[cell viewWithTag:4] setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:kThemeAge,
                                          [itemNode elementNodeWithKey:@"theme"].value,
                                          [itemNode elementNodeWithKey:@"age"].value]];

    UIImageView *bgview = (UIImageView *)[cell viewWithTag:0];
    [bgview setImage:[itemNode imageFromKey:@"background"]];
    [cell sendSubviewToBack:bgview];

    return cell;
}

Answer 1

Ok, this was pretty stupid of me… I had the tag of the UIImageView set to 0 and then was using viewWithTag:0 to find that view. Yet, the parent view also had tag 0, so instead of my background UIImageView, the entire cell was being set to the image (I wouldn’t think that a table cell view would respond to setImage – but it did.

I now changed the tag on UIImageView to 5 – and everything is hunky-dory.