How to hide a section in UITableView?

Question

There are some section in the table that does not contain any data and would like to hide that section.

How to do this?

Answer 1

For the case of static table, that is, the table sections and cells are configured in Storyboard. The following are my strategies to hide a specified section depending conditions.

Step one: implement two func defined in UITableViewDelegate - heightForRowAt - heightForHeaderInSection

For example, here are swift codes:

override func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, heightForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> CGFloat 
{
   // if indexPath contains the specified section AND
   //    the condition for hiding this section is `true`
   //       return CGFloat(0)
   // else 
   //    return super.tableView(tableView, heightForRowAt: indexPath)
}

override func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, heightForHeaderInSection section: Int) -> CGFloat 
{
   // similar logic to set header height
}

Step two: define a func to set cells hidden for specific section and call it from viewWillAppear:

private func setSectionVisible()
{
   /*
   if condition for visible is true
      let index = IndexPath(row:..., section:...)
      let cell = self.tableView.cellForRow(at: index)
      cell.isHiden = true
   */
}

override func viewWillAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
    super.viewWillAppear(animated)
    self.setSectionVisible()
}

In case you need to reload tableview, you may need to call setSectionVisible() again.

I think this strategy may work for dynamic data from DataSource. In this way, you can control when to make specific section visible or hidden.