TableView reloadData vs. beginUpdates & endUpdates

Question

I got a tricky problem regarding updating my TableView, i get different results using different methods of updating it, let me explain:

Situation 1:

Answer 1

The first difference between reloadData and reloadRowsAtIndexPaths is that there are 2 UITableViewCell objects allocated simulteaneosuly for the same indexPath when doing reloadRowsAtIndexPaths (because the tableview 'blends' in the the new cell) . This is sometimes not foreseen by the code in cellForRowAtIndexPath .The surprise comes from the fact that even if a cell was already allocated for a particular cell identfier the table view does not give you back this cell in dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier when calling reloadRowsAtIndexPaths, instead it returns nil. In contradiction reloadData reuses the cells it already allocated .

The 2nd difference is that endUpdates after reloadRowsAtIndexPaths directly calls cellForRowAtIndexPath (if you set a breakpoint there,endUpdates is visible in the stack trace) whereas reloadData schedules the calls to cellForRowAtIndexPath at a later time (not visible in the stack trace).

However you would need to post a bit more code to give us insight what you are doing there. In principle the indexPaths of the new cells are identical to the old ones also with reloadRowsAtIndexPaths as long as you don't delete or insert rows.