Get data from a cell with "willSelectRowAtIndexPath" in Swift2

Question

I'm trying since two weeks with the help of many Tutorials to get and segue data from a TableView cell. But it seems it is impossible to do that in XCode. It is only possible to get the selectedRow of a cell, but I cannot read out the Text labels of a selected cell.

If a user selects a Cell I want to segue the value of a label in the selected cell to a new View Controller.

I can only submit the selected row to a new View Controller but not the value of a label in this selected cell.

func tableView(tableView: UITableView, willSelectRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> NSIndexPath? {
   row = indexPath.row // here is the row the user has selcted
    labelStringOfselectedCell = "??????" // how to retrieve data from a label in the cell?
    return indexPath
}

override func prepareForSegue(segue: UIStoryboardSegue, sender: AnyObject?) {
    let DestViewController : ViewControllerDetail = segue.destinationViewController as! ViewControllerDetail
    DestViewController.seguedData = labelStringOfselectedCell
}

Answer 1

If you really wanted to do something like that, you can do something like:

func tableView(tableView: UITableView, willSelectRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> NSIndexPath? {
    let cell = tableView.cellForRowAtIndexPath(indexPath)  // do not confuse this with the similarly named `tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:` method that you've implemented
    let string = cell?.textLabel?.text
    return indexPath
}

Clearly it depends upon whether you're custom cell subclass and what the label was, but that illustrates the basic idea.

Having said that, you should not do this. Your app should be following Model-View-Controller (MVC) programming paradigm. When determining what data to pass to the next scene, you should go back to the original model you used when originally populating the table, not referring to some control in the table.

For example, let's imagine that you populated the original cell by retrieving data from the objects model:

func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
    let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("Cell", forIndexPath: indexPath) 
    let object = objects[indexPath.row]
    cell.textLabel?.text = object.name
    return cell
}

Then you would just implement a prepareForSegue that retrieves the data from objects also (and you don't have to implement willSelectRowAtIndexPath at all):

func prepareForSegue(segue: UIStoryboardSegue, sender: AnyObject?) {
    if let destination = segue.destinationViewController as? ViewControllerDetail {
        let object = objects[tableView.indexPathForSelectedRow!.row]
        destination.seguedData = object.name
    }
}

Clearly, this will change depending upon what your model was and how you originally populated the cell, but hopefully it illustrates the basic idea.