What exactly does reloadData call?

Question

When calling reloadData on a UITableView what methods are actually invoked?

[tableView reloadData];

Answer 1

The whole table view is reloaded, it calls cellForRowAtIndexPath to get the cells for all your rows and sections...doing so it also calls numberOfSections method of tableView datasource and numberOfRows method of tableview data source etc etc

Answer 2

Also, for future reference, that information is readily available in the documentation here. Copy/pasted from Apple's documentation:

Call this method to reload all the data that is used to construct the table, including cells, section headers and footers, index arrays, and so on. For efficiency, the table view redisplays only those rows that are visible. It adjusts offsets if the table shrinks as a result of the reload. The table view's delegate or data source calls this method when it wants the table view to completely reload its data. It should not be called in the methods that insert or delete rows, especially within an animation block implemented with calls to beginUpdates and endUpdates