I'm trying to mimic the iMessage bubble text behaviour with an UITableView. In order to always scroll to the bottom I'm using scrollToRowAtIndexPath when viewDidLoad and viewDidAppear. This is because when the viewDidLoad method is called, the table has not been completely loaded, so I need that extra scroll in viewDidAppear. This code makes the trick. However, what I want is not an animated scroll (setting animated to NO does not solve this), I want the table to be displayed always from the bottom, not load the table and then go to the last row.
Is this possible? I can't find any solution that fits completely with the desired behaviour.
You can avoid the call from viewDidLoad because scrolling from within viewDidAppear makes that first call redundant. viewDidAppear is called every time you navigate back to the view but viewDidLoad is only called once when the view is initialized.
I would agree with earlier suggestions of hiding the scroll from the user instead of changing the way a UITableView is loading data. My suggestion would be to use the scrollToRowAtIndexPath method in the viewWillAppear method with animation set to NO. After that if you have to add a new row while the table is visible to the user, use insertRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation: to add a row at the bottom of the table view. Be sure to take care of adding the data at the end of your data model so that when the user navigates away and comes back, s/he comes back to the same layout.
Hope this helps.
edit: Just saw your reason for not accepting the previous answers and thought I'd elaborate a little more. The solution I propose would require minimum effort, avoid calling reloadData time and again and thus avoid calling the scrollToRowAtIndexPath method again and again. You only need to make one call to scrollToRowAtIndexPath in viewWillAppear to scroll to the bottom of the table view (hiding the transition from the user when doing so) and you wouldn't need to do that again.