NSKeyedUnarchiver + UITableViewController not functioning correctly - iphone

I am attempting to use NSKeyedArchiver to store the state of my UITabBarController. Inside the tabs are UINavigationControllers which contain UITableViewControllers.
The archiving appears to work without any problem.
When unarchiving I am running into strange problems with my UITableViewControllers. initWithCoder: is called correctly, and the first thing I am doing inside there is calling [super initWithCoder:]
The tableView appears to be correctly recreated, and has a delegate and dataSource property already set. If my initWithCoder: does nothing but call super and return self then my table view ends up empty and my delegate methods are not called. If I hookup the delegate and dataSource properties of self.tableView I see my content correctly, but didSelectRowAtIndexPath is not called upon selecting, and in one instance I am unable to scroll until the tableView is reloaded.
If in initWithCoder: I create a new UITableView everything works but I don't believe I should need to do this.
Am I doing something I shouldn't be in attempting this, or am I missing something obvious that I need to add to get things working correctly?
Update: setting self.tableView = [decoder decodeObjectForKey:#"tableView"] inside my controller seems to solve the scroll/select problem, but the resulting tableView is always UITableViewStylePlain and still seems like the wrong thing to do as the property is already set.

Your design pattern is certainly unusual. Normally, you wouldn't try to archive the table view, just the data used to create it. Then when you need the table view again, you would recreate it from those data, using the same code you used to create it in the first place.

Related

Reloading a table's data

I have 5 view controllers, which are in a navigation controller hierarchy. When I reach my last view controller, there's a button that lets me go back to the "Home" view controller (named CardWalletViewController) which is a table view controller. Here's the method I have in my last VC (PointsResultsVC)
- (IBAction)homePressed:(id)sender {
NSArray *VCs = [self.navigationController viewControllers];
[self.navigationController popToViewController:[VCs objectAtIndex:0] animated:YES];
}
CardWalletVC's cells is being filled up by values coming from the saved instances of a Card in NSUserDefaults and it works fine.
Now, what I want is to update the value in my CardWalletViewController, which is the points of a card coming from my PointsResultsVC. Note that this points is saved in NSUserDefaults.
Upon the process of trying to update of the value shown in my CardWalletVC, I placed [self.tableView reloadData]; inside -viewDidLoad, -viewWillAppear, and -viewDidAppear of the said class. I tried placing it one by one in each of this methods, yet it doesn't seem to work.
Advice Please.
EDIT: problem solved
This one served as my guide Save data from one tab and reloadData in another tab.
And as I have discovered, -viewDidLoad of a certain class will only be called once, all throughout runtime of app. Whereas -viewWillAppear, it will be called every time the view appears.
So, I just moved the way I am loading the values saved in NSUserDefaults from -viewDidLoad to -viewWillAppear. Also, inside -viewWillAppear I placed the [self.tableView reloadData]. Then there, problem solved.
There's a lot of things that could be going wrong so you'll need to provide more info to narrow it down.
First of all, viewDidLoad will not be called so you can remove it from here. Both viewWillAppear and viewDidAppear will be called, so you only need it one of these 2 methods.
Next, you need to determine what the actual issue is.
1 - is self.tableView a proper reference to the table? Are you properly maintaining the reference?
2 - is the table actually reloading but using the old data, or is it not reloading at all? You can log the willDisplayCell method to see what is going on when the view appears.
With that info, the root cause can be narrowed down to a solvable problem.

How to add the UI for one of the tab controller's using loadView when the rest were via Interface Builder?

I have a main window which has the UITabViewController as its root controller. I am using a nib file for this. In Interface Builder, two of the tabs have been wired to Controller_A, Nib_A and Controller_B, Nib_B but the 3rd tab only knows about Controller_C.
I assumed that this would mean that the loadView method of Controller_C would be automatically called since I haven't bothered to specify the NIB file. I want to lay this piece out programmatically. And it DOES indeed get called as I've confirmed by placing a breakpoint inside this method.
BUT when I switched over to Controller_C in the simulator, it comes up empty!
Here's what the loadView of Controller_C looks like:
- (void)loadView
{
[super loadView];
...
[self setTableView:formTableView];
[view addSubview:formTableView];
[self setView:view];
}
Any tips? What am I ignoring?
Looks like you are searching for:
-(void)viewDidLoad {
Here are the main things to check.
Click on your Controller_C in interface builder. In the Identity Inspector, make sure that the Class field is set to Controller_C.
In the Attributes Inspector, make sure the NIB Name field is blank.
If you have an existing Controller_C.xib laying around in your project, remove and delete it. The default implementation of loadView loads this file even if
Remove [super loadView]. Since you're building your view hierarchy in code, you shouldn't invoke the default implementation. You should explicitly allocate the controller's view as a local variable in loadView and set it using setView:.
Also, your comment on the other answer suggests that you may be confused about when/why loadView and initWithNibName:bundle: get called, so let me clarify:
loadView gets called to lazy load your controller's view the first time its view property gets accessed. This is true whether your view controller was constructed as an object in a NIB, or whether you constructed it yourself in code using initWithNibName:bundle:. The default implementation of loadView loads the NIB that was specified in initWithNibName:bundle: or in the NIB Name property in IB. If a NIB name wasn't specified, the default implementation looks for any NIB in the bundle that has the same name as your class and loads that NIB if one is found. If no appropriate NIB is found, then the default implementation of loadView just creates an empty view and sets that as your controller's view. When we build our own view hierarchy explicitly in loadView, we don't want any of these default behaviors, so we don't call [super loadView].
It seems loadView works as expected, the reason that my view was blank is because the datasource for my tableview was actually NIL. Earlier, I did not consider this scenario as I thought that it would at least present an empty table in such a case but apparently that was an incorrect assumption on my part. All this mistakenly led me to believe that the view wasn't being initialized properly.
#cduhn: Thanks, I had been following steps 1-3 already and it was really good to hear someone else give the same advice. The rest of what you said was educational for me as well.
Thanks Everyone.

three20 - TTTableViewController Memory warning gives blank screen, how to fix?

This is driving me nuts. I am using three20's TTTableViewController and when I get a memory warning, the screen goes white. Now, after reading on the three20 google group is seems that the tableView got released. But, I cannot for the life of me figure out a check to see if that is the case, then create it again.
I was using the following because I thought it would fix the issue, but it seems that it doesn't satisfy the if statement:
- (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated {
[super viewDidAppear:animated];
// If we don't have a datasource we need to reset it
if (!self.dataSource) {
// Create datasource again
}
}//end
Does anyone know what to do when this happens? The google group has been no help.
Are you subclassing TTTableViewController? I haven't used it before, but assuming it's just like UITableViewController...
How does your "viewDidUnload" look like? Are you releasing the tableview here? If so, you need to create tableview in viewDidLoad to match it.
No need to check if dataSource is available in viewDidAppear, because if you read View programming guide, it explains that memory warning will call "viewDidUnload" to give you a chance to clean up data that are created in "viewDidLoad".
i had the same issue and it drove me crazy as well.
Nobody mentions it in the three20 docs, but you shouldn't use UIViewController's initWithNibName function to add subviews. If you do, a memory warning will release these subviews.
Try to move your code from initWithNibName function to viewDidLoad function. I have noticed that some code need to be kept in the initWithNibName, such as navigation styles. However, any subviews added to the controller's view should be in the viewDidLoad function.
In general you should be careful to set up views in viewDidLoad rather than the class constructor. For instance, you should set up your launcher view in viewDidLoad rather than the constructor of your launcher view controller, otherwise your launcher will become empty after a memory warning.
In the case of TTTableViewController however this does not (usually) apply because you don't set up the table view manually. I had the same problem you had, and eventually tracked it down: I had redefined viewWillDisappear: and forgot to call [super viewWillDisappear:animated]. This meant that some of the flags that the Three20 controller maintains about the state of the view were not updated correctly.
I also found that it was beneficial to redefine didReceiveMemoryWarning to call [self setEditing:NO] before calling super; I found that the state of the table view got confused otherwise (this is not relevant if you don't use edit mode for your table).
Finally, there is a bug in Three20 which means that tables in loading/empty/error mode will not be restored properly; see a discussion in the blog post by TwoCentStudios and a proposed fix on github.

Managing calls to objects that get deallocated when the view is backed out of

I have a view controller managed in a UINavigationController. My view controller puts up a "loading" screen, and uses ASIHTTP to asynchronously load table data. Then it renders its table, and in each cell there's an image that it uses ASIHTTP to asynchronously load. When it lands each image, it uses [self.tableView reloadRowsAtIndexPaths] to reload that row, inside which the image is fed to the UIImageView in each row.
Works great. But if I back out of the view before it's done loading, it crashes.
Where it crashes is in my -tableView:numberOfRowsInSection method, and NSZombies tells me it dies because it's asking for the -count of an NSArray called self.offers that has been deallocated.
That method looks like this:
-(NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)table numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
return [self.offers count];
}
Wrapping that return in if (self.offers) made no difference.
My -dealloc releases and sets-to-nil every one of these properties, including both self.offers and self.tableView itself. I even tried setting up a BOOL disappearing property, hitting it with YES in -viewWillDisappear, and hanging conditional behavior off that, but it doesn't work because viewWillDisappear doesn't seem to get called! Far as I can tell we're not getting ANY method called when the navigation bar pops us off.
What do I do about this?
EDIT:
Thanks to #cduhn (who's bucking for a check!), I did a bunch more looking at this. The problem has been, my -dealloc just isn't getting called when I pop this viewcontroller (nor my -viewWillDisappear nor -viewDidUnload or anything else I could use to unhook the delegation structure that's at the root of this problem).
Then I realized: THIS viewController isn't the one on the NavController stack! What's at the top of the stack right here is a shell view, just a segmented controller and a big empty UIView. I toggle the contents of that UIView between two other UIViewController subclasses depending on the state of my segmented controller. So when my view with the table on it's PARENT view gets popped from the nav stack, this CHILD I'm working on doesn't seem to get any notice about it. Which is odd, because I'm definitely releaseing it.
I can call its -dealloc from my shell controller. I could call its -viewWillDisappear too, for that matter. Is that how I should be handling this? Probably I should put something into my shell controller's viewWillDisappear like:
[[self.mainView subviews] makeObjectsPerformSelector:#selector(viewWillDisappear)];
...so that message propagates down to my child views.
Am I on the right track here, you think??
(Oh man... and that also explains why actions from inside this child table view can't get to self.navigationController! I've been puzzled about that for weeks!)
Bugs like this, where a method gets called on an object after it's been deallocated, often happen when a method gets called on a delegate after that delegate has been deallocated. The recommended practice to avoid bugs like these is to set any delegate (or delegate-like) properties of an object to nil before you release that object in the delegate's dealloc method. I know that's a confusing sentence, so I'll explain it in the context of your bug.
You have an asynchronous image download that finishes after you've backed out of your table view controller. When this happens, you're calling reloadRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation:, which results in a call to tableView:numberOfRowsInSection: on the table view's dataSource. This call is failing because that dataSource no longer exists.
The problem is that the table view object still has your controller set as its dataSource and delegate properties, even after your controller has been deallocated. The solution is to simply set these properties to nil in your controller's dealloc, like this:
- (void)dealloc {
self.tableView.dataSource = nil;
self.tableView.delegate = nil;
self.tableView = nil; // Releases as a side-effect due to #property (retain)
[super dealloc];
}
Now when your table view tries to call tableView:numberOfRowsInSection: on its dataSource, it will send the message to the nil object, which swallows all messages silently in Objective C.
You should also do the same thing with your ASIHTTPRequest's delegate, by the way.
Any time you have an asynchronous operation that calls delegate methods upon completion, it's particularly important that you set that delegate to nil. When using UITableViewController under normal circumstances you can typically get away without setting the dataSource and delegate to nil, but in this case it was necessary because you're calling methods on the tableView after its controller has gone away.
As far as I can tell, the user cannot actually "back out" of a view while the UITableView is loading it's data. The methods are not run on a thread and block the main one, also blocking UI interaction. I cannot replicate your results. Even, scrolling the table view quickly and then pressing the back button.
I suggest that the stack popping is not the problem here.

Problem reloading UITableView

I have a UITableView which is populated by an array, I have a button on the navigaton bar which (when pressed) adds an item to the array and calls [self.tableView reloadData] in the UITableView. This results in numberOfRowsInSection being called and returning the correct number of rows (the number of items in the array) BUT doesn't call cellForRowAtIndexPath.
I have created a new navigation based application to try and find a solution but have exactly the same problem!
If anyone knows the answer it would be greatly appreciated, i've been tearing what's left of my hair out for the last day!
I have put the source for the test project up on my site at www.sofaracing.com/Downloads/Test3.zip
Works for me! ;)
In MainWindow.xib, You added an object Root View Controller (that's not part of the Navigation Controller) - Delete it, not necessary. Then connect outlet refreshFriendsList to the Bar Button of the NavigationItem of RootViewController. Wha-la, magic!
BTW: You may need to clean up the warning. And you might want to think about creating a class for your data model instead of using UIApplication sharedApplication.
I quickly debugged your test app. I couldnt't spot the root cause, but it seems that you have two different table views due some mess up in Interface Builder setup.
If you initialize original array with an item, cellForRowAtIndexPath is correctly called. If you examine self.tableView instance in this call and later in subsequent calls to refreshFriendsList, self.tableView points to a different instance.
2009-05-17 14:33:07.591 Test3[33580:20b] cellForRowAtIndexPath 0
2009-05-17 14:33:07.594 Test3[33580:20b] self.tableView: <UITableView: 0x52b9b0>
2009-05-17 14:42:36.810 Test3[33762:20b] numberOfRowsInSection: tableView <UITableView: 0x53bcd0>