Endless UITableview Section

Question

Hi,

I have a table view with one section. I pull the data down from the internet in small chunks asynchronously in the background. The problem I have is I don't know how many records there will be in total. When the web service stops returning data I know I have them all, in some cases the rows might be infinite.

The method:

-(NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section

is understandably called once at the beginning of view load, at this point I don't know how big my section is going to be. Any ideas on how best to approach this problem? Can I set the section size anywhere after this method has been called?

Answer 1

You can make the tableview reload it's data, call

[tableView reloadData];

...and it will ask the datasource about number of rows etc again.

Answer 2

You say data is pulled in chunks - so only update your table in chunks.

Each time a chunk is downloaded, reload the table. This way, you know how many rows there are after each chunk is finished.

Example:

1. App loads (no data)
2. Chunk downloads
   • Put results into array
   • 6 rows in array, return [array count] in number of rows in section method
   • reload table
3. repeat step 2 until done.

Reload data does not reset the scroll position.