Question

I’ve created a custom table view cell in my iPhone app through the following steps.

1. In my storyboard, I created a sample cell, dragged in a UILabel and a UIImageView.
2. Added new files, which I made a subclass of UITableViewCell.
3. In Interface Builder, I selected my cell and I assigned its class as the class I just created in step 2.
4. In the code for my custom table view cell, I created two IBOutlet properties and connected them to my UILabel and UIImageView in the storyboard.

5. My custom table view cell also includes a method, where it receives another object from which it sets its own attributes:

   -(void)populateWithItem:(PLEItem *)item
   {
       if (item.state == PLEPendingItem) {
           status.text = @"Pending upload..."; //status is a UILabel IBOutlet property
       }
       else if(item.state == PLEUploadingItem)
       {
           status.text = @"Uploading...";
       }
   
       imageView.image = [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:item.path]; //imageView is the UIImageView IBOutlet property
   }
   

This method is called from my tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath as follows:

    PLEPendingItemCell* cell = (PLEPendingItemCell*)[tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:item_id];
    if (cell == nil) {
        cell = [[PLEPendingItemCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:pending_id];
    }

    [cell populateWithItem:((PLEItem*)[itemList objectAtIndex:indexPath.row])];

    return cell;

The problem is that the cells always show up empty. I set a breakpoint in populateWithItem and realized that both the status UILabel and the image UIImageView were nil inside that method.

Shouldn’t IB be initializing these? If not, where should I be doing that?

Answer 1

If you’re setting up your cell in the storyboard, you always need to create your cell using tableView:dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:forIndexPath: because that’s where the storyboard creates your cell and hooks up the views.

Creating a cell with its constructor directly, as in your sample code, won’t load any subviews from a storyboard, nib, etc. The class you’ve made doesn’t know anything about the storyboard prototype cells.