Delegates, can't get my head around them

Question

Hey, I\'m looking for useful resources about Delegates. I understand that the delegate sits in the background and receives messages when certain things happen - e.g. a table

Answer 1

A delegate is a way of adding behaviors to a class without subclassing or for attaching a controller to a class.

In the table view example you gave, the delegate is extending or controlling the table, not the cell. The table is designed to have a controller, the cell is not. This design choice is why you can't specify cell-specific delegates.

However, delegate methods will always announce the source object (the one to which the delegate is attached) and relevant parameters (like the cell involved) so you should always be able to handle the action fully.

In your case, if you have a cell and you would like the cell to manage itself, then the delegate method (which will probably be implemented on your UITableViewController) can simply fetch the cell from the source table using its NSIndexPath (passed as a parameter to the delegate method) and invoke a method on the cell subclass to do its work.