How to assign value to tableview cell?

Question

I have the following Swift code, which is mostly auto generated once a tableview is added:

func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
    let cell:UITableViewCell = UITableViewCell(style: UITableViewCellStyle.Default, reuseIdentifier: "test")
    return cell.textLabel.text = "test"
}

I get the following compile time error:

Cannot assign a value of type 'String' to a value of type 'String?'

I have tried ! (unwrapping) in the cell.textLabel.text syntax to no effect. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

You're supposed to be returning the cell, not text from cellForRowAtIndexPath. You also should be using dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier to get your cell.

override func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
    var cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("test") as UITableViewCell!
    cell.textLabel?.text = "test"
    return cell
}

Answer 2

The textLabel as a part of the UITableViewCell is optional and therefore you need to change your code to this:

cell.textLabel?.text = "test"
return cell

To add on to this you should not be getting your cell using that method, you should use:

let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("test", forIndexPath: indexPath) as UITableViewCell

So in the end your code should look like this:

func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
    let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("test", forIndexPath: indexPath) as UITableViewCell
    cell.textLabel?.text = "test"
    return cell
}