I have a UITableView subclass and a UITableViewCell subclass that I'm using for cells. I'm bulding all my cells in advance and store them in an array from where I use them in cellForRowAtIndexPath. Aside from this I have a thread that loads some images in each cell, in the background. The problem is that the cells don't get refreshed as fast as the images are loaded. For example, if I don't scroll my table view, the first cells only get refreshed when all cells have been modified and the thread has exited.
Any ideas on how I can effectively refresh my tableview/cell?
Have you tried calling [cell setNeedsDisplay] but on the main thread?
setNeedsDisplay when called on a background thread does pretty much nothing,
try this:
[cell performSelectorOnMainThread:#selector(setNeedsDisplay) withObject:nil waitUntilDone:NO];
Are you using a callback to notify the controller of your tableview that the images have been loaded? If not, that would be an ideal method.
When the image loads, fire off a callback to the table view controller that sets the image on the cell, and then calls reloadData on the tableView.
This way whenever a new image loads, the table will update to display it.
Not sure exactly what you are trying to achieve with the images - but can I guess they are coming from a server and that is why you want to download them in another thread?
I would not try to load up the cells before you display the table - you should use lazy loading as much as possible to make sure you are making the most of the memory on a device.
My suggestion would be to look at using a subclass of NSOperation to manage the loading of images. Firstly NSOperation will handle all the complexity of threading for you and allow you to queue up the operations. You will then be able to prioritise the operations that you want completed for the cells at the top.
As each operation completes you can make a call back to the cell or tableViewController (perhaps create a delegate protocol to make this really easy).
If you have an operation per image/cell combination then you should be able to refresh each cell as the operation completes. Doing this along with prioritising the operations will give you an optimal solution.
If the NSOperations sound complex or you are put off by this - please do try it - it is a lot simpler than I might have made it sound.
Have you tried calling [cell setNeedsDisplay]?
Related
I have an iPhone app that starts in a table view and goes to a different table view when the user selects a cell. The two table views are in separate classes (or whatever the proper Objective-C term is, ie. 2 different .h and .m files), and the second table view makes a request from a server based on the selection in the first table. There is a noticeable delay and I've been trying to put a UIActivityIndicatorView up when that happens, but that only displays for a split second when view segues to the second table view. I know this is an issue with threading, but I can't get this to work following any of the other posts on this topic. I call my startAnimating in didSelectRowAtIndexPath and the stopAnimating in the viewDidDisappear. I have also tried using the following code to get this to work by calling it in the didSelectRowAtIndexPath: [activityIndicator performSelectorInBackground: #selector(startAnimating) withObject: nil]; How do I make the activity indicator (or any loading animation for that matter) to work when the server request is going on?
I see that this is a frequent problem on Stack Overflow, but I did just find a working solution. I found this forum iphonedevsdk.com/forum/tutorial-discussion/… My issue was a synchronous connection taking up my main thread, so starting the spinner and then calling the connection in a separate method does the trick.
I am trying to load a table view from a cache very quickly and have the cached data in the table view appear. Then I want download new data, and then reload the table. Right now I am downloading the new data on viewDidAppear, but the view still refreshes before it displays. Any idea how I can do this?
viewDidAppear is not a good place to download data; it is really intended for clean up after presenting data, so I can understand why you used it. You should request your data reload as early as possible, such as in viewDidLoad or viewWillAppear (depending on your reuse or otherwise of view controllers).
If you are doing asynchronous downloads, which you should be, put the reloadData call in your delegate callback function for when the data is completed.
Simply calling [tableView reloadData] after the download might do the trick. This will trigger a refresh of your table cells.
To download the new data, you may consider using Cocoa Streams, particular an asynchronous Socket Stream. In the stream delegate, call reloadData when the download is completed.
I ended up implementing the delegate class to do this asynchronously. This example was extremely helpful, and I implemented much of its code:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/samplecode/URLCache/Introduction/Intro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40008061-Intro-DontLinkElementID_2
I have a UITableview that I load with data async so the tableview might appear without data.
I have tired the ReloadData method but the tableview remains empty until I scroll the tableview, suddenly the data appears.
The same thing happens when I load a tableview as a detailedview and switching between items, the previoud items data appears first and as soon as I scroll in the table view it shows the correct data.
My guess is that the ReloadData method works just fine, but I need to redraw the tableview somehow, any suggestions on how to solve this?
/Jimmy
You said you're populating content asynchronously but did you invoke the reloadData in the context of the main thread ? (and not via the thread that populates the content)
Objective-C
[yourUITableView performSelectorOnMainThread:#selector(reloadData)
withObject:nil
waitUntilDone:NO];
Swift
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), { self.tableView.reloadData() })
Monotouch
InvokeOnMainThread(() => this.TableView.ReloadData());
Yonels answer is perfect when your view is currently visible to the user (e.g: User presses a reload button which populates your UITableView.)
However, if your data is loaded asynchronously and your UITableView is not visible during the update (e.g: You add Data to your UITableView in another View and the UITableView is displayed later by userinput), simply override the UITableViewController's viewWillAppear method.
- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated{
[super viewWillAppear:animated];
[self.tableView reloadData];
}
The positive effect is that your UITableView only reloads it's data once when the user actually want's to see it, not when new items are added.
I had the similar issue today(Storyboard in iOS 7.0).
I was using table View inside a UIViewController.When the view was loaded everything was working fine; all the delegates were getting called.However ; When the underlying dataSource(in my case,Array) was modified; the visible table rows were not getting updated.They were updated; only when I was scrolling the table view.
Tried everything; calling reloadData on Main thread;calling reload in ViewWillAppear; nothing worked.
The issue that I found ; was that I had not made the connection in storyboard; for the table view with the reference Outlet.The dataSource and delegate were set though.
I did not think that it could be the issue; as everything was working fine at the first go.
Hope it helps someone.I had some terrible time to find this out.
I guess it wasn't reloaded.
When you scroll the cells to out of screen, then…
tableView: cellForRowAtIndexPath:
…will be called. So it will be reloaded.
I guess UITableView variable is not validated.
If you use UITableView as a main view, you can try this.
[self.view reloadData];
or
[self.tableView reloadData];
Swift 4:
DispatchQueue.main.async { self.tableView.reloadData() }
After somewhat naively copying in yonel's solution and calling it good I realized that calling performSelectorOnMainThread:withObject:waitUntilDone: fixed the symptom, but not the problem. The bigger problem is that you are making UI updates while still in the context of the asynchronous or background thread.
This is what my code looked like:
dispatch_queue_t queue = dispatch_queue_create("com.kyleclegg.myqueue", NULL);
dispatch_async(queue, ^{
// Make API call
// Retrieve data, parse JSON, update local properties
// Make a call to reload table data
});
When it should look like this:
dispatch_queue_t queue = dispatch_queue_create("com.kyleclegg.myqueue", NULL);
dispatch_async(queue, ^{
// Make API call
// Retrieve data, parse JSON, update local properties
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
// Now make the call to reload data and make any other UI updates
[self.tableView reloadData]
});
});
If the only thing you need to do is call [self.tableView reloadData] it's probably fine to use performSelectorOnMainThread:withObject:waitUntilDone: since it accomplishes the same goal, but you should also recognize what's happening in the big picture. Also if you are doing more UI work than just reloading the table then all of that code should go on the main queue as well.
Reference: A concise example of using GCD and managing the background vs. main thread.
I'm using the three20 project for my iPhone app. I've narrowed my problem down and I'm now just trying to re-create the 'Web Images in Table' example that comes with the project. I've copied the code exactly as in the project, with the exception that I do not use the TTNavigator (which the example does) but I am adding my TTTableViewController manually to a tabBar.
The problem is as follows; the images in the table should load automatically from the web, like in the example. But they only load after I scroll the table up and down.
In the console it clearly says it is downloading the images, and you see the activity indicator spinning like forever.. And unless I scroll up and down once, the images will never appear.
Anyone? Thanks in advance.
P.S:
If I'm using this code in any random UIView, It also doesn't work (only shows a black square):
TTImageView* imageView = [[[TTImageView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(30, 30, 100, 100)] autorelease];
imageView.autoresizesToImage = YES;
imageView.URL = #"http://webpimp.nl/logo.png";
[self.view addSubview:imageView];
If I put this code in my AppDelegate (right onto the window), it does work .. strange?
POSSIBLE SOLUTION:
Although I stopped using TTImageView for this purpose, I do think I found out what the problem was; threading (hence accepting the answer of Deniz Mert Edincik). If I started the asynchronous download (because basically that is all the TTImageView is, an asynchronous download) from anywhere BUT the main thread, it would not start. If I started the download on the main thread, it would start immediately..
Sounds like a threading problem to me, are you creating TTImageView in the main runloop?
I find one interesting thing. When I use combination TTTableViewController, TTTableViewDataSource and TTModel I have same problem with loading TTImageView. My problem was, that my implementation of Model methods 'isLoading' and 'isLoaded' don't return proper values after initialization of model. That forces me to call reload on model manualy in 'viewDidAppear' method and that causes image loading problem. So I repair my 'isLoading' and 'isLoaded' methods to both return 'NO' after Model init, and everything is fine.
When an image finishes loading try sending a reloadData message to the table view. This forces the table to recalculate the size of the rows and redraw the table. Just be careful that you don't start downloading the image again in response to this message.
I've written something similar to this where an image view will load its own image from the web.
Im my experience, when the image had loaded successfully but was not shown in its view, it was a case that the cell needed to be told to redraw.
When you scroll the table view, the cells are set to redraw when the come onscreen, which is why they appear when you scroll.
When the image loads, tell the cell that it is sitting in to redraw by sending it the message setNeedsDisplay.
That way, when the image finishes downloading, the cell its sitting in (and only that cell) will redraw itself to show the new image.
It's possible that you might not need to redraw the entire cell and might be able to get away with simply redrawing the image view using the same method call. In my experience, my table cells view hierarchy was flattened, so I had to redraw the whole cell.
I don't have an answer for what you want to do, but I will say that this is considered a feature, and the expected behavior. You use TTImageView in UITableView when you want to do lazy loading of images. TTImageView will only load the images whose frames are visible on the screen. That way, the device uses its network resources to download images that the user has in front of them, rather than a bunch of images that the user isn't even trying to look at.
Consider having a long list that may contain a couple hundred thumbnail images (like a list of friends). I know from experience that if you kick off 100+ image requests on older devices, the memory usage will go through the roof, and your app will likely crash. TTImageView solves this problem.
This is a thread problem. You can load the images by including the line:
[TTURLRequestQueue mainQueue].suspended = NO;
in - (void)didLoadModel:(BOOL)firstTime.
I am working on a an application which is very simple
a navigation controller with a table view
when the user clicks a row, he is directed to the details view.
However, the details view pulls data from Core Data. i am pulling a relatively large amount of data that takes about three seconds to load.
I wanted to add that UIActivityIndicatorView to show progress.
I tried to start the animation once the user clicks the row, so i set it to animate in didSelectRowAtIndexPath
For some reason, the Activity Indicator doesn't start before the pushing of the details view.
Any idea why? or the best way to implement such an idea?
~Adham
Because you start the animation and then start a large operation in the same thread. Consider running that 3 second operation in a new thread. Look at NSOperationQueue and then create a NSOperation to run that procedure. It will work this way.
The UI doesn't update until the end of your run loop. You are, in sequence, displaying the activity monitor, then pushing the new table view, and then the UI updates. You need to change this order.
You can either move something to a different thread, or you could perhaps delay the loading of the new table view by calling performSelector:afterDelay: with a delay of 0. That will delay the loading of the new table view until after the activity indicator appears in the UI. Now, it's still all on the same thread, so you will be blocked from doing anything, but if the animation is threaded in the activity monitor, it would make for a quick and easy solution.
Call method in thread:
[NSThread detachNewThreadSelector: #selector(loadMethod) toTarget:self withObject:nil];
See following for more details:
http://iphone.zcentric.com/?s=UIActivityIndicatorView