Question

Why doesn’t UITableViewCell background color work (set in interface builder)?

I note from some searching that the follow code set in your custom subclass of UITableViewController does work (see below):

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView willDisplayCell:(UITableViewCell *)cell forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    cell.backgroundColor = [UIColor redColor];
}

But I would still like to just understand why interface builder has a background color setting for the TableViewCell, which effectively doesn’t seem to work?

Answer 1

(try this)

Apple’s IB’s design is generic to be applied to multiple kinds of components, and is also targeted at a highly technical audience (developers). Hence it has not been designed (as an application) to fully customise the interface properly for each component/situation type. So in this case it is the case the ability to seemingly set the background-color is somewhat misleading.