Custom Cell with Button Memory Problems

Question

I have a custom cell that contains a button in a table view. The button is used as a toggle to essentially serve as a "checkbox" for a user to check off certain items in the list. I was having the issue in which the buttons in these table cells seemed to be sharing memory locations as a result of the dequeuereusablecellwithidentifier. When a button was pressed, it would also press every 4th or 5th button in the list.

I changed it to create my cells in a method into an array which then populates the tableview. This works fine for what I am trying to achieve, however it poses an issue when dealing with large row counts. The tableview itself runs quickly, but the initial load can be 3-4 seconds at times when there are over 100 rows. The iteration to create the cells and then populate it to the tableview is quite cumbersome.

What other methods can you populate a tableview with custom cells and buttons while still retaining unique memory for the buttons within?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks :)

Answer 1

You definitely don't want to change the way the creation of cells work- dequeuereusablecellwithidentifier is a very good thing for the reasons your seeing.

The solution is that you should store the result of the button/checkbox press in a separate data structure, like an NSArray full of NSNumber. As your table scrolls and cells are reused, you reset the state of the checkbox to whatever state it should be based on your NSArray.

Good luck!