Question

Just curious, as it doesn’t immediately seem possible, but is there a sneaky way to leverage the new iOS 6 UIRefreshControl class without using a UITableViewController subclass?

I often use a UIViewController with a UITableView subview and conform to UITableViewDataSource and UITableViewDelegate rather than using a UITableViewController outright.

Answer 1

On a hunch, and based on DrummerB’s inspiration, I tried simply adding a UIRefreshControl instance as a subview to my UITableView. And it magically just works!

UIRefreshControl *refreshControl = [[UIRefreshControl alloc] init];
[refreshControl addTarget:self action:@selector(handleRefresh:) forControlEvents:UIControlEventValueChanged];
[self.myTableView addSubview:refreshControl];

This adds a UIRefreshControl above your table view and works as expected without having to use a UITableViewController 🙂

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EDIT: This above still works but as a few have pointed out, there is a slight “stutter” when adding the UIRefreshControl in this manner. A solution to that is to instantiate a UITableViewController, and then setting your UIRefreshControl and UITableView to that, i.e.:

UITableViewController *tableViewController = [[UITableViewController alloc] init];
tableViewController.tableView = self.myTableView;

self.refreshControl = [[UIRefreshControl alloc] init];
[self.refreshControl addTarget:self action:@selector(getConnections) forControlEvents:UIControlEventValueChanged];
tableViewController.refreshControl = self.refreshControl;