UIView not filling table views tableHeaderView property swift

Question

I have a very peculiar situation and want to know why its happening. I have an edit box and button in a view that I put into a tableview's tableHeaderView property. I call this view InputToListCell.

Now when the view extends UIView I get the following:

i.e all I change in the code is:

class InputToListCell: UIView{
   //Code Here
}

I then change InputToListCell to extend UITableViewCell and get the following:

i.e

class InputToListCell: UITableViewCell{
   //Code Here
}

Why is this behaviour occurring? I cant see why because UITableViewCell extends UIView. Any thoughts?

Update:

Based on a comment made here are the constraints for the InputToListCell:

I basically pin both the edit text's and Add buttons constraints to the margin, except for the edit text's trailing value.

Could have to do with how your Autolayout constraints are set on InputToListCell. Can you update your question with some info about that? — hgwhittle, Jan 26 '16 at 18:56
Pleasa add your cellForRowAtIndexPath method implementation and constraints for cell subviews — shpasta, Jan 26 '16 at 19:02

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

In short

Use UITableViewCell for table view elements.

self.tableView.tableHeaderView =
    tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("sectionIdentifier")

Discussion

Using UITableViewCell objects for all table view elements not only provide an umbrella behavior when presented inside a UITableView, but will also allow loading from a .storyboard or .xib, an added bonus and cohesion.

Thus, even though tableHeaderView (and viewForHeaderInSection for that matter) is informally just a UIView, you can return a UITableViewCell. According to this post, to take advantage of Autolayout in tableHeaderView, you need to do a bit of gymnastics:

if let tableHeaderView = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("tableHeaderViewIdentifier") {
    tableHeaderView.setNeedsLayout()
    tableHeaderView.layoutIfNeeded()

    let height = tableHeaderView.systemLayoutSizeFittingSize(UILayoutFittingCompressedSize).height
    var frame = tableHeaderView.frame

    frame.size.height = height
    tableHeaderView.frame = frame
    self.tableView.tableHeaderView = tableHeaderView
}

From a different post:

For a complete example on how to use .storyboard or .xib for headers, including an Xcode project, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/32261262/218152

UIView not filling table views tableHeaderView property swift

1 Answers1