UICollectionView cell draws top left - ios

Question

This is my first time working with UICollectionView.
I've got everything set up and laid out as it should be (as far as I know). I've had a little bit of difficulty with the way the dequeue function works for the UICollectionView, but I think I've gotten past that. It was tricky setting up my custom cell classes when I didn't know if initWithFrame would be called or prepareForReuse.
I'm pretty sure the problem lies within the prepareForReuse function, but where is the question.
What happens is, the cells will apparently randomly draw at the top-left of the collection view and some cells will not be where they belong in the grid. (see image attached)
When bouncing, scrolling, and zooming (so as to cause reuse to occur), the problem happens. Randomly a slide will appear in the top left, and other slides will randomly disappear from the grid.
( I need more rep to post an image. Ugh. :| If you can help me, I'll email you the image. bmantzey#mac.com )
-(UICollectionViewCell*)collectionView:(UICollectionView *)collectionView cellForItemAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath{
Slide* thisSlide = [_presentation.slidesInEffect objectAtIndex:indexPath.row];
[BuilderSlide prepareWithSlide:thisSlide];
BuilderSlide* cell = [collectionView dequeueReusableCellWithReuseIdentifier:#"PlainSlide" forIndexPath:indexPath];
return cell;}
I'm using a static method to set the Slide object, which contains the data necessary to either prepare the asynchronous download or retrieve the image from disk cache.
It's simply:
+(void)prepareWithSlide:(Slide*)slide{
if(s_slide)
[s_slide release];
s_slide = [slide retain];}
I'm not sure if it's a big no-no to do this but in my custom Cell class, I'm calling prepareForReuse in the initWithFrame block because I need that setup code to be the same:
-(id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame{
self = [super initWithFrame:frame];
if(self)
{
[self prepareForReuse];
}
return self;}
Here's the prepareForReuse function:
-(void)prepareForReuse{
CGSize size = [SpringboardLayout currentSlideSize];
[self setFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, size.width, size.height)];
self.size = size;
// First remove any previous view, so as not to stack them.
if(_builderSlideView)
{
if(_builderSlideView.slide.slideID == s_slide.slideID)
return;
[_builderSlideView release];
}
for(UIView* aView in self.contentView.subviews)
{
if([aView isKindOfClass:[BuilderSlideView class]])
{
[aView removeFromSuperview];
break;
}
}
// Then setup the new view.
_builderSlideView = [[BuilderSlideView alloc] initWithSlide:s_slide];
self.builderCellView = _builderSlideView;
[s_slide release];
s_slide = nil;
[self.contentView addSubview:_builderSlideView];
if([SlideCache isImageCached:_builderSlideView.slide.slideID forPresentation:_builderSlideView.slide.presentationID asThumbnail:YES])
{
[_builderSlideView loadImageFromCache];
}
else
{
[_builderSlideView loadView];
}}
Finally, when the slide image has been downloaded, a Notification is posted (I plan on changing this to a delegate call). The notification simply reloads the cell that has received an update. Here's the notification code:
-(void)didLoadBuilderCellView:(NSNotification*)note{
BuilderCellView* cellView = [[note userInfo] objectForKey:#"cell"];
BuilderSlideView* slideView = (BuilderSlideView*)cellView;
NSIndexPath* indexPath = [self indexPathForSlide:slideView.slide];
if(indexPath)
[self.collectionView reloadItemsAtIndexPaths:[NSArray arrayWithObject:indexPath]];}
Note that the slide objects exist in the model.
Any ideas as to what may be causing this problem? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The problem that was causing the cells to draw top left and/or disappear was caused by infinite recursion on a background thread. Plain and simply, I wasn't implementing the lazy loading correctly and safely. To solve this problem, I went back to the drawing board and tried again. Proper implementation of a lazy loading algorithm did the trick.