Outlets are nil when having custom cell with XIB in UITableView in Storyboard with static cells

Question

I want to use static cells in a UITableView in my storyboard. But also I want those cells to be loaded from a custom .xib file with a custom UITableViewCell subclass.

I want to do this because I want to reuse the cells in multiple table views.

So I added some static cells in storyboard and set the custom class in the identity inspector.

But when I want to access the Outlets in the custom view's awakeFromNib method, they are nil. Even later, they're not beeing instantiated.

How can I do this the right way?

Answer 1

Ok I figured it out, how this is possible:

I created a container class for my UITableViewCell as it is described in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/34881072/4846592

This class contains a property to get access to the custom cell and loads the XIB in its initializer

Here's the code for Swift 3

class CustomTableViewCellContainer: UIView {    
var cell: CustomTableViewCell!

    required init?(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
        super.init(coder: aDecoder)

        cell = Bundle.main.loadNibNamed("CustomTableViewCell", owner: self, options: nil)!.first as! TextFieldTableViewCell
        cell.frame = self.bounds
        cell.autoresizingMask = [.flexibleWidth]
        self.addSubview(cell)
    }
}

Then, I just added a UIView into the ContentView of a static UITableViewCell in the Storyboard and set the height and CustomTableViewCellContainer as custom class name. Finally I added an IBOutlet to it to get access to the custom cell.