iphone - How to use prepareForReuse method

Question

I found this method called - (void)prepareForReuse. I read the document but I don't understand how to use it.

When I scroll my tableview, it gets stuck, or has slow scrolling and I intend to use prepareForReuse. Can someone please point me to a good tutorial or give me some sample code so i could learn.

Sorry I don't have any code to demonstrate my working.

Answer 1

The prepareForReuse method is called by the owning table view on a cell that is not needed right now. You are supposed to do minor cleanup here for your custom cell, like resetting alpha values and the like, so it can then later be reused. You shouldn't call it yourself, BTW.

You only ever need to care about it if you're implementing custom table view cells: you overwrite it to do your cleanup.

You're "using" it simply by using reuse identifiers in tableView:cellForIndexPath::

static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Identifier";

cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
if (cell == nil) {
    cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault
                                   reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    [cell autorelease];
    // Set up your cell
}

To further improve your table view performance, see the question Tricks for improving iPhone UITableView scrolling performance?