Styling Custom Cells

Episode #385 | 15 minutes | published on April 5, 2019 | Uses swift-4.2, Xcode-10.1

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In this episode we add our tableview cell styling to match the design, using autolayout to arrange the views and using the Xcode View Debugger to find and fix a visual glitch when using dark background cells.

This episode is part of a series: Making a Podcast App From Scratch.

1. Intro 1 min

2. New Project Setup & Theming 14 min

3. Storyboard References 5 min

4. Reusable Views 10 min

5. Styling Custom Cells 15 min

6. Working with Remote Images 16 min

7. Creating an API Client 18 min

Creating a View Model for our Cells

struct SearchResultViewModel {
    let artworkUrl: URL?
    let title: String
    let author: String
}

We can now use this in our cell subclass to configure the views.

// in SearchResultCell.swift
func configure(with result: SearchResultViewModel) {
    podcastTitleLabel.text = result.title
    podcastAuthorLabel.text = result.author
    // image download will come later
}

Styling the Cell

We can configure a lot of the styling in the storyboard, however we want to be able to reference the theme's color constants.

override func awakeFromNib() {
    super.awakeFromNib()

    backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray4
    backgroundView = UIView()
    backgroundView?.backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray4

    podcastTitleLabel.textColor = Theme.Colors.gray0
    podcastAuthorLabel.textColor = Theme.Colors.gray1
}

This looks good until you tap on a cell. The selected style makes the labels unreadable.

To fix this, we'll add this to the awakeFromNib() method.

    selectedBackgroundView = UIView()
    selectedBackgroundView?.backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray3

Configuring the Table View

For the tableView separator, we can customize the color and indentation, as well as the background color for the overall view:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    tableView.backgroundColor = Theme.Colors.gray4
    tableView.separatorColor = Theme.Colors.gray3
    tableView.separatorInset = .zero
}

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