Subclassing a UITableViewContoller subclass created using Storyboard

Question

In my application, I thought it would be a good idea to create a subclass of UITableViewContoller (call it GenericTableViewContoller) which has a few prototype cells created in Storyboard that are reused throughout the app.

Now, what I wanted to do was to create a subclass of GenericTableViewContoller (say SpecialTableViewController) that has some other prototype cells created in Storyboard that are used only in SpecialTableViewController.

Thus, I have two scenes in my main storyboard, one for GenericTableViewContoller and one for SpecialTableViewController, each with their own set of prototype cells.

The problem I am running into, is that SpecialTableViewController gets nil prototype cells when I call dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier: for a cell identifier declared in the GenericTableViewContoller scene. Cells declared in the SpecialTableViewController scene dequeue just fine.

Is this expected behavior (I have a strange suspicion it is)? Do I have to call registerNib:forCellReuseIdentifier: in SpecialTableViewController to actually get them registered from the other scene? Any simple way to get around this?

Answer 1

Is this expected behavior (I have a strange suspicion it is)?

Yeah, this is the expected behavior. The core concept here is that the storyboard is a object-instance designer, not a class designer. For example, you're free to make three scenes, each with the same view controller class, but all with different view layouts.

There isn't an simple way to share prototype table cell layouts between different table view instances short of putting them into their own XIB, and using -registerNib:forCellReuseIdentifier: and manual segues.