UITableViewCell's contentView's width with a given accessory type

Question

On an iPhone, how do you figure out the width of a table view cell's content view when it is showing a certain accessory view (disclosure indicator, etc)?

I need this in order to calculate the correct cell height for cells that contain wrapping, variable-length text. But when the table view delegate is asked for a cell height, it doesn't actually have the actual cell instance, so it can't just query the content view bounds directly.

I can easily hard-code a 20-pixel margin on the right which appears to be accurate for a plain style table view in portrait orientation with a disclosure indicator, but would prefer to do it the Right Way so that it keeps working if Apple decides to tweak the margin.

(This is related to this question.)

Answer 1

I would have a subclass of UITableViewCell that holds all its subelements. You can cange the frame of certain elements when the cell enters and exists editing mode. There is a good example of this in Apple's Table View Programming guide under the section on creating a custom table view cell.

Answer 2

I believe the UITableViewCell's contentView property is the view that contains your labels etc., so the width of that should be your available size to use.

Answer 3

Personally, I would just hard code the values -- simpler and things will break in a predictable way.

But were I to do this programmatically, I would create a UITableViewCell, set up the editing properties / accessory views you need to measure, and then ask it how big its contentView is.

Of course I would probably heavily cache this -- doing allocations when asking UITableView asks you for height information sounds to me like it would be slow (check with a profiler first though, as always).