Custom draw a UITableViewCell

Question

I am trying to create a UITableViewCell which overrides the complete drawing of the contents. I have overridden drawRect, which is being called, but it still draws the default contents.

How do I get it to stop drawing the default contents and how do I replace it with my own rendering?

- (id)initWithStyle:(UITableViewCellStyle)style reuseIdentifier:(NSString *)reuseIdentifier {

    DLog (@"Overloaded TableCell initWithStyle");
    if (self = [super initWithStyle:style reuseIdentifier:reuseIdentifier]) {

    }
    return self;
}

- (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect {
    DLog (@"TableCell::drawRect");

    // expecting it to draw nothing
}

Solution 1

Loren Brichter (author of Tweetie) talked about this in one of the iTunes U Stanford iPhone Programming course lectures. He said that he had gotten great scrolling performance results by subclassing UITableViewCell and drawing the contents of each cell directly and he gives a code example in his blog post on the subject.

He also notes that apple has added a similar example in one of their code examples.

Solution 2

Loren Brichter's blog is no longer available. However, the code was moved here:

https://github.com/enormego/ABTableViewCell

In the hope it's a more permanent URL.

Solution 3

Try creating a subclass of UIView (with your own drawRect) and assign it to the table cell's contentView instead.

Comments

[Michael Grinich]

this is also always covered a ton at WWDC, if you can get the session videos.

[tyler]

I don't see how this response answer's the question: 'I have overridden drawRect, which is being called, but it still draws the default contents.'

[Olaf]

There is a snapshot of the Blog entry in the web.archive: web.archive.org/web/20081215081040/http://blog.atebits.com/2‌​008/…