UITableViewCell Separator disappearing in iOS7

Question

I have some strange issue with UITableView only in iOS 7.

UITableViewCellSeparator disappears above the first row and below the last row. Sometimes after selecting the rows or some scrolling actions it appears.

In my case tableView is loaded from the Storyboard with UITableViewStylePlain style. The problem is surely not in UITableViewCellSeparatorStyle, which is not changed from default UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleSingleLine.

As I read at Apple Dev Forums (here and here) other people have such problem and some workarounds are found, for example:

Workaround: disable the default selection and recreate the behaviour in a method
trigged by a tapGestureRecognizer.

But I am still searching for the reason of such separator strange behaviour.

Any ideas?

Update: As I saw in XCode 5.1 DP and iOS 7.1 beta, Apple tried to fix this problem. Now separator is shown as needed sometimes below the last row, after some refreshing, but not after tableview creation.

Solution 1

I dumped the subview hierarchy of affected cells and found that the _UITableViewCellSeparatorView was set to hidden. No wonder it's not shown!

I overrode layoutSubviews in my UITableViewCell subclass and now the separators are displayed reliably:

Objective-C:

- (void)layoutSubviews {
    [super layoutSubviews];

    for (UIView *subview in self.contentView.superview.subviews) {
        if ([NSStringFromClass(subview.class) hasSuffix:@"SeparatorView"]) {
            subview.hidden = NO;
        }
    }
}

Swift:

override func layoutSubviews() {
    super.layoutSubviews()

    guard let superview = contentView.superview else {
        return
    }
    for subview in superview.subviews {
        if String(subview.dynamicType).hasSuffix("SeparatorView") {
            subview.hidden = false
        }
    }
}

The other solutions proposed here didn't work consistently for me or seem clunky (adding custom 1 px footer views).

Solution 2

This worked for me:

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {

    // fix for separators bug in iOS 7
    self.tableView.separatorStyle = UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone;
    self.tableView.separatorStyle = UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleSingleLine;

Solution 3

I also had the problem with missing separator and I found out that the problem only occured when heightForRowAtIndexPath was returning a decimal number. Solution:

override func tableView(tableView: UITableView, heightForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> CGFloat {
    return ceil(yourHeight) // Ceiling this value fixes disappearing separators
}

Solution 4

Did you try adding a UIView of height 1 in the header and the footer of the table with light gray background color? Basically it'll mock the first and last separators.

Solution 5

We encountered this issue in our app. When the user selected a cell, a new table view was pushed onto the navigation controller stack and then when the user popped it off, the separator was missing. We solved it by putting [self.tableView deselectRowAtIndexPath:indexPath animated:NO]; in the didSelectRowAtIndexPath table view delegate method.

View more solutions

Comments

[B.S.]

What about the case if I do not implement even heightForRowAtIndexPath method?

[Joney Spark]

Interesting. However, it happens in my project as well - and heightForRowAtIndexPath isn't implemented. In IB row/cell height is 100.

[Joney Spark]

This workaround fixed it for me; however, I reversed it - to retain the selection. So, first deselect, then re-select.

[Gergely Kovacs]

It did not solve the issue for me and I do have the heightForRowAtIndexPath method.

[Nick Frolov]

Solves the issue at least partially. The cell does seem to be confused about non-integer heights.

[airpaulg]

I don't know what to override when you say "after the data is reloaded"

[wrightak]

Have you tried self.tableView.allowsMultipleSelection = NO;?

[skinsfan00atg]

this sounds good, but how exactly do you do this? use viewforfooter?

[skinsfan00atg]

isn't as easy as it sounds, for some reason i had to also implement heightforfooter otherwise the height specified in the initwithframe was ignored. i also notice though that the lightgraycolor is not the same color so this won't really work. might have to make a custom gray

[trss]

You need to ceil the number of pixels and then divide by screen scale factor to get points which is okay to be in decimal. If you don't do this, it won't be retina optimized.

[NiñoScript]

You deserve more up votes, this is exactly what I needed, I added it in a category, so now after I do [tableView reloadData], if this bug happens (in my case the footer separator that was hidden is reappearing), I call [tableView reloadSeparators];

[surfrider]

Worked for me. Thanks. Any other methods didn't help me (include separator style change from samvermette's answer).

[agarcian]

This fix the issue for me. Thank you so much!

[Vitalii Boiarskyi]

I have used your method but not in subclass I had added a category to UITableViewCell. It helped me. Thanks.

[Ortwin Gentz]

Of course it's also possible in a category. Since this requires method swizzling, I went for the simple subclass approach.

[juhan_h]

This is the only solution that worked for me. My problem popped up whe the UITableView had enough rows to be scrollable. That "hasSuffix:" part is quite fragile though.

[JackyJohnson]

that's pretty janky IMO

[airpaulg]

Yeah I fully agree. It's the sole workaround I found right after iOS 7's release, is there any better approach now?

[Jeff]

To match the color, use tableView.separatorColor

[Foriger]

Works for me. Maybe question is silly, but isn't this using of Private API ?

[Ortwin Gentz]

Technically it's not using private API and your app won't be rejected because of this. It relies on an implementation detail though and could break in a future iOS version.

[David]

@Foriger if you worry of using hasSuffix:@"SeparatorView", try to replace it with if(CGRectGetHeight(subview.frame) < 1.1). It probably even would work faster whether you don't use any other 1px custom views in your cell. I chose 1.1px 'cos in Retina UITableViewSeparator has 0.5 points height, but for non-Retina it could be 1.0.

[Alex Sfinx87]

Works for me, grouped UITableView (iOS 7 and iOS8).

[ObjectiveTC]

YES. This worked for me, after converting over to latest version of Swift. ++ for calling fixSeparators after every call to tableView.endUpdates().

[Lukas Petr]

I am glad this was helpful to you! I really believe this is the best solution, so hopefully more people will discover it.

[Dan Dyer]

Although this mostly fixed the problem for me, for some reason one of my separators was still disappearing. Combining this fix with the toggling of tableView.separatorStyle suggested in other answers (which by itself made no difference for me) made it work for all of the separators.

[Brett]

Setting clipSubviews to false in the storyboard for both the cell and the contentView fixed the issue! Needs more up votes!

[Rene Juuse]

Setting clipsToBounds to YES on the cells was enough for me.