UITextField within UITableViewCell - ios

Question

In my application I am creating UITextField within UITableViewCell so that user can fill some information. This is my code:
if (![cell.contentView viewWithTag:10])
{
UITextField *textField=[[UITextField alloc]initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 200, 30)];
[textField setTag:10];
[textField setBorderStyle:UITextBorderStyleRoundedRect];
[textField setBackgroundColor:[UIColor redColor]];
[cell.contentView addSubview:textField];
}
I am doing this so that I create that UITextField only once for each cell so that the textFields don't overlap... but a problem happened for example when the user writes in the textfields:
row 0 -> 0
row 1 -> 1
row 2 -> 2
row 3 -> 3
row 4 -> 4
And so on, if you have number of rows more than 10 and you started to scroll I can notice that the cells exchange there indices randomly so i can get something like:
row 0 -> 3
row 1 -> 1
row 2 -> 2
row 3 -> 0
row 4 -> 4
in the UITextField.text
how to make something or a trick like fixed position for each cell?

Answer 1

This can look as a 'bad' decision, but I would strongly recommend you Not to use UITableView with UITextFields unless you have like 40 textfields, because of the following reasons:
It lags the way you described, because NSIndexPath is calculated on
the go and the text that user filled in the textfields would jump
around the table when you scroll.
You will have a mess when implementing logics to get out text from
the textfields.
You will have to implement a big piece of code to implement "scroll
table up and down" animation to let user navigate through textfields,
i.e in textFieldDidBeginEditing
If you still want to use tableview, i would recommend you to set some key to each of your UITextFields, and create a datasource (like NSDictionary) that binds this key to a certain text value that you can get from it any time.
Then you will probably have an ugly piece of code like this:
- (IBAction)textFieldValueChanged:(UITextField *)sender
{
MyTableCell *cell = (MyTableCell*)sender.superview.superview;
[self.formDataSource setObject:cell.formTextField.text forKey:cell.contentKey];
}
Then when you need you can enumerate through formDataSource allValues property.

Answer 2

Here's an abbreviated sample of how I do this in one of my view controllers:
- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
UITableViewCell *cell
= [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:AttributeCellIdentifier];
NSString *propertyName = #"...";
NSString *className = #"...";
UILabel *label = (UILabel*)[cell.contentView viewWithTag:1];
UITextField* textField = (UITextField*)[cell.contentView viewWithTag:2];
textField.text = [self stringForAttribute:propertyName];
label.text = propertyName;
return cell;
}
tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath: is part of the UITableViewDataSource protocol. It gets called whenever the table view needs to scroll new cells into view. Since it is recycling cells that have scrolled out of view automatically, you need to reset the state of the cell in this method based on the values in your model.
You may also find it useful to know you can configure your custom cell in Interface Builder, in your Storyboard. Just be sure to set an appropriate reuse identifier so that your controller will always be able to supply the right type of cell.