UILabel shadow from custom cell selected color

Question

I'm loading a custom nib file to customize the cells of a UITableView. The custom nib has a UILabel that is referenced from the main view by tag. I would like to know if it is possible to change the shadow color of the UILabel when the cell is selected to a different color so it doesn't look like in the screenshot.

Answer 1

I prefer to make the shadow color change inside the TableCell code to not pollute the delegate. You can override this method to handle it:

- (void)setHighlighted:(BOOL)highlighted animated:(BOOL)animate
{
    UIColor * newShadow = highlighted ? [UIColor clearColor] : [UIColor whiteColor];

    nameLabel.shadowColor = newShadow;

    [super setHighlighted:highlighted animated:animate];
}

Answer 2

You could change the label's shadow color in -tableView:willSelectRowAtIndexPath: in the delegate. For instance:

-(NSIndexPath*)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView willSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    UITableViewCell* cell = [tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];
    cell.textLabel.shadowColor = [UIColor greenColor];
    return indexPath;
}
-(void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didDeselectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    UITableViewCell* cell = [tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];
    cell.textLabel.shadowColor = [UIColor redColor];
}

Answer 3

I had the same issue and none of the above solutions quite worked for me - I didn't want to subclass UITableViewCell and also had some tricky selected/highlighted state changes done programmatically, which did not play well with the solutions above.

MySolution:

What I did in the end is to use a second UILabel underneath the primary UILabel to act as a shadow. For that 'shadow' UILabel you can set the 'Highlighted Color' to 'Clear Color'.

Obviously you have to update the shadow label each time you update the primary label. Not a big price to pay in many cases.

Hope that helps!

Answer 4

The simple answer, at least for the example shown above, is to not display the shadow in the first place. Since you can't see the white-on-white anyway, set the shadowColor to -clearColor.

If you actually need a shadow though, overriding the -setHighlighted method is the best solution. It keeps the code with the cell, which I think is better than trying to handle it from the table view.