在原型表视图单元格中填充文本字段

Question

Apologies in advance, as I am extremely new to iOS and objective-C and this is probably a very basic question, but I've hit a wall, and after days of searching the Web, I'm still lost:

I'm generating a dynamic table with various different types of prototype cells. One type has only a text field into which the user can enter or edit an arbitrary string. I've designed the cells in the Storyboard Editor because I would rather not muck about with generating everything programmatically if possible.

I have a string already in a variable which i want to use to populate the text field.

How do you go about addressing and populating this field? I assume the answer involves doing so at the moment the cell is called into existence with dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier, but this is as far as I've managed to get...and I need help connecting the dots.

I have already read the Apple "Table View Programming Guide for iOS," and it's been unhelpful with this problem.

(if I could have tagged this question "noob"...)

Answer 1

Create a new subclass of UITableViewCell and set the class of your cell to this class. (select the cell and then click the identity inspector, the 3rd icon from the left. Enter the class name there where it says: Class) You will also need to specify an Identifier for the cell. I often times put in the same name as the class, so don't get the two confused in the code below. One is the identifier, the other is a class.

In your cellForRowAtIndexPath, get an instance of your special class.

-(UITableViewCell*)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    static NSString *cellIdentifier = @"EventCell";

    EventCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:cellIdentifier];
    [cell populateTextField];

    return cell;
}

When you have the storyboard open, you can control-drag from the text box to your new class to create an outlet property. (Let's call it textField)

Your property would look like this after you ctrl-drag and then enter when the dialog is shown:

@property (weak, nonatomic) IBOutlet UITextField *textField;

Then in your new class, create that populateTextField method:

-(void)populateTextField {
    self.textField.text = @"My special string";
}

Also note, that you can put in placeholder text on a textField, so you may not need to go through all of this.