Add UIView at bottom of UITableViewCell programmatically

Question

I'm working on a instant messaging app. The user can send text messages, for which I'm using a UITextView inside the custom tableview cells. The user should be able to send all kinds of multimedia data, such as images, documents and videos.

Inside my table view cell I have both a textView and a UIImageView in a stackView and I can send the respective kinds of data. If there is no text, I hide the TextView. If there is no Image, I hide the image.

The problem is: to scale the app, I'd have to add a new container for documents, another one for videos, another one for audio files and hide all the other containers that have no data added to it. It's a garbage solution, but it was the only one that I found.

Knowing from the backend what kind of data is sent, how could I programatically add a container view in which I make the setup on the spot? I was thinking of having a textView as default and an empty View and inside cellForRowAt just add the needed elements.

Answer 1

I would try to create several cells which you dequeue in cellForRowAt by checking for a criteria, eg:

    if userPost.images != nil {
                let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier: "Identifier1", for: indexPath) as! UITableViewCell
return cell
            } else {
                let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier: "Identifier2", for: indexPath) as! UITableViewCell
                return cell
            }

With this solution, you can create a cell that nicely fits the data a user sent another user. Just check for any criteria you want and return the according cell.

Hope it helped!