UITableView: deleting sections with animation

Question

Update

I have posted my solution to this problem as an answer below. It takes a different approach from my first revision.

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Ori

Answer 1

I’ve run into this problem before. You are trying to delete all rows from a section and then, in addition, that now empty section. However, it is sufficient (and proper) to remove that section only. All rows within it will be removed as well. Here is some sample code from my project that handles deletion of one row. It needs to determine whether it should remove only this row from a section or delete the entire section if it is the last remaining row in that section:

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView commitEditingStyle:(UITableViewCellEditingStyle)editingStyle forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    if (editingStyle == UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete)
    {
        // modelForSection is a custom model object that holds items for this section.
        [modelForSection removeItem:[self itemForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath]];

        [tableView beginUpdates];

        // Either delete some rows within a section (leaving at least one) or the entire section.
        if ([modelForSection.items count] > 0)
        {
            // Section is not yet empty, so delete only the current row.
            [tableView deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:[NSArray arrayWithObject:indexPath]
                             withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade];
        }
        else
        {
            // Section is now completely empty, so delete the entire section.
            [tableView deleteSections:[NSIndexSet indexSetWithIndex:indexPath.section] 
                     withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade];
        }

        [tableView endUpdates];
    }
}