Get text from UITextField on a TableViewCell

Question

I have a UITableViewController with prototype cells containing UITextFields. To configure these custome cells, I've created a UITableViewCell subclass. I've conected the textField to the cell subclass via an outlet (nonatomic, weak).

On this subclass I've created a protocol for which the UITableViewController is its delegate so that everytime something changes in these textFields, the TableViewController knows about it. Basically I wanted this to save the values on the NSUserDefaults

Besides, in order to dynamically obtain values from these textFields, I can do something like this:

((TextFieldCell*)[self.tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:[NSIndexPath indexPathForRow:2 inSection:0]]).textField.text

It works ok most of the times. However when the textField is outside of the view because it has scrolled, the vaulue I get from textField.text is (null). As soon as it gets in the view again, everything goes back to normal.

I tried to change the outlet from weak to strong but to no avail.

I guess I could define some private NSStrings on the class, and fill them out when the delegate protocol gets called. The thing is that I wanted to get my code as generic as possible, keeping the need for private variables as low as possible, mostly to simplify the cell generation code.

Is there any other way to get the values of the textFields when they are outside of the view?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

As Thyraz said, the UITableView only keeps cells for the visible rect -- and a reasonable buffer to allow for scrolling. Thats why 'reuse identifiers' are so very important, they indicate which cells can be used for which tables (critical when you have more than one table to worry about). Unfortunately, that doesn't answer your question by itself.

The responsibility for storing the contents of those textViews isn't on the UITableView's shoulders. It's your job to provide that data through the data source delegate protocols, and therefore you should be querying the data source for that information.

Edit: Which means that yes, you should be storing this data somewhere else, usually in the form of properties on the view controller class that contains the table view. I'd recommend the use of NSArray for the purpose, but you can also do it through dicts or even, at the last resort (and this is more a in theory you can do this, but it's an incredibly bad idea kind of thing), a series of properties. Personally, I almost always use NSArrays because they're structured in a manner appropriate to the problem, but you could theoretically do it other ways. (I've used a dict based structure exactly once, and that was a situation where my data was nested inside itself in a recursive structure)

Answer 2

But you know that UITableView only keeps Cells for the visible rect? When a cell leaves the screen, and a new cell is needed for another cell moving into the visible area, the old cell is reused for the new content.

So there is not one cell for each row of your table view. And if your table contains a lot data, there are far more rows than cells.

Answer 3

UITableViewController doesn't keep cells around once off the screen. You can use the following pattern to get a previously used one as a memory management optimization, but you MUST assume that cells need to have the values reset on them every time they come onto the screen (even if dequeued) because there is no guarantee what the values will be.

-(UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    static NSString *CellIdentifier1 = @"Cell1";
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier2];
    if( cell == nil ) {
        cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleValue1 reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier1] autorelease];
        cell2.accessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryDisclosureIndicator;
        cell2.editingAccessoryType = UITableViewCellAccessoryNone;
    }   
    switch( indexPath.section ) {
        case first_Section:
            if( row == 0 ) {
                cell1.textLabel.text = @"Some Text";
                cell1.accessoryView = [self myCustomViewControl];
                cell = cell1;
            }
            ... etc
    }
}