Dynamically populating an iOS table view with Swift from an API - ios

Question

I'm currently in the process of creating an app to display the latest football scores. I've connected to an API through a URL and pulled back the team names for the english premier league into an array of strings.
The problem seems to come from populating the iOS table view that I intend to display the list of teams with. The data appears to be pulled from the API fine, but for some reason the TableView method which creates a cell and returns it doesn't seem to be called. The only time I can get the method to be called is when I actually hard code a value into the array of team names.
Here is my code:
class Main: UIViewController {
var names = [String]()
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
let URL_String = "https://football-api.com/api/?Action=standings&APIKey=[API_KEY_REMOVED]&comp_id=1204"
let url = NSURL(string: URL_String)
let urlRequest = NSURLRequest(URL: url!)
let config = NSURLSessionConfiguration.defaultSessionConfiguration()
let session = NSURLSession(configuration: config)
let task = session.dataTaskWithRequest(urlRequest, completionHandler: {
(data, response, error) in
do {
let json = try NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data!, options: .AllowFragments)
if let teams = json["teams"] as? [[String : AnyObject]] {
for team in teams {
if let name = team["stand_team_name"] as? String {
self.names.append(name)
}
}
}
} catch {
print("error serializing JSON: \(error)")
}
})
task.resume()
}
// Number of Sections In Table
func numberOfSectionsInTableView(tableView: UITableView) -> Int {
return 1
}
// Number of Rows in each Section
func tableView(tableView: UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection section: Int) -> Int {
return names.count
}
// Sets the content of each cell
func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("Cell", forIndexPath: indexPath)
cell.textLabel?.text = names[indexPath.row]
return cell
}
}
Just wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction here. This code doesn't crash or throw any errors, it just refuses to load a table view. The only reason I can possibly think of is that the array of team names is empty after completing a request to the API. However I've set breakpoints throughout and checked the values of local variables and the desired information is being pulled from the API as intended...

Answer 1

you are in the correct way , just refresh the table using reloadData once you got the new data from API
if let teams = json["teams"] as? [[String : AnyObject]] {
for team in teams {
if let name = team["stand_team_name"] as? String {
self.names.append(name)
}
}
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), { () -> Void in
self.yourtableViewname.reloadData()
})
}