UITableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier: returns nil more than once

Question

In my test on the device and in simulator, dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier: returns nil more than once (about 5 times for a table with 15 rows). Is this normal? I was under impression it should return nil only the very first time?

Answer 1

The UITableView class implements the behaviour of dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:. As long as you're calling it in the right place (i.e. inside of tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:) then there's not much you can do about it returning or not returning reusable cells.

It's not something I'd worry about unless I could prove that specific behaviour was giving me crashes or performance issues.