Question

I’ve built a custom UI for my table that has a darker UI and a custom accessoryView. When I put the table into editing mode, there is a white line to the left of the reorder control that I can’t seem to get rid of.

tableView:accessoryTypeForRowWithIndexPath: doesn’t seem to be appropriate for getting rid of it since I’m not using a standard UITableViewCellAccessoryType, so I’m not sure of what I can do to get it to not show up on my cells.

_{(source: secondgearsoftware.com)}

Answer 1

What is happening is that when UITableViewCell shows the reorder control it also adds an empty, 1 pixel wide, white UIView to its array of subviews.

Bluntly: this is a bug that Apple should fix.

However, you can get around it by finding that annoying view every time it appears and setting its background color to transparent. Quick tip: the annoying white view is always the last in the UITableViewCell’s subviews array and is always 1 pixel wide. We will use this to find it.

When you turn editing on for the table, make all of the visible annoying 1 pixel views transparent. So the action method which toggles “edit” mode on the table might look like this:

- (IBAction)edit:(id)sender
{
    [tableView setEditing:!tableView.editing animated:YES];

    for (UITableViewCell *cell in [tableView visibleCells])
    {
        if (((UIView *)[cell.subviews lastObject]).frame.size.width == 1.0)
        {
            ((UIView *)[cell.subviews lastObject]).backgroundColor =
                [UIColor clearColor];
        }
    }
}

and keep doing so for all new views as they become visible by implementing this in your UITableViewDelegate:

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView
    willDisplayCell:(UITableViewCell *)cell]
    forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    if (((UIView *)[cell.subviews lastObject]).frame.size.width == 1.0)
    {
        ((UIView *)[cell.subviews lastObject]).backgroundColor =
             [UIColor clearColor];
    }
}

This hack to fix the problem is fairly innocuous and if Apple fix the bug in future (stop adding the annoying 1 pixel view), this code should quietly stop doing anything.