A number of times, I've chased myself down rat holes in iPhone projects because I've created a design or implementation that assumes UITableView and NSTableView are similar objects. They aren't.
The main problem I come across is related to how the cells are treated in Cocoa and in Cocoa touch. An AppKit table comprises columns, each of which uses a cell to display its content. A cell contains the drawing and event-handling stuff of a view, but nothing to do with its place in the view hierarchy or responder chain. It's essentially a light-weight view. For each row in the table, NSTableColumn takes its cell, configures it for the content in that row and then draws the cell at its location in the column. No matter how many rows there are, a single cell is used.
UIKit works differently. Of course a UITableView only has one column, but it also displays views rather than cells. This is good, but leads to the key distinction that always trips me up: you can't use the same view more than once in a table view. Of course, sections in a UITableView will often have more than one row, but each row that is visible on-screen will needs its own instance of UITableViewCell (which is a subclass of UIView, and therefore a view in the traditional sense rather than a cell). If you try to re-use the same instance multiple times, the table view will configure each row but only the last one it prepared will be drawn.
So what's this -reuseIdentifier? stuff? That's related to caching views for scrolling. Imagine a table view with 10 rows, of which 4 can be seen on screen at once. Each uses the same type of cell in this example. When the table view first becomes visible there will be 4 UITableViewCell instances in use, displaying rows 0-3. Now you start to scroll the view. UITableView finds it needs an extra cell to display row 4, which is now partially on-screen and row 0 is starting to slide off. When row 0 disappears completely, the table view could just delete its cell - but rather than do that, it adds it to a queue of reusable cells. When row 5 starts to appear, the table view can re-use the object it's already created for row 0, because it's the same type of cell as the one for row 5 and is currently unused.
So, that's that really. Note to self: don't treat UIKit like it's just AppKit, you'll end up wasting a day of code.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Nice post. It's probably good to add that UITableView re-uses the views because of memory constraints on the phone.
By constantly reusing the same set of views, it's possible to have thousands of rows in a tableview and still have only 5 or so in memory.
Hi Klaas,
in fact it could save a little more memory by just throwing away views that goes out of its clipped area. By re-using them, it saves time that would otherwise be spent unarchiving and instantiating the views.
Post a Comment