How to register a cell for UICollectionView reuse

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

If you're working entirely in code, you can register a UICollectionViewCell subclass for use with your collection view, so that new cells are dequeued and re-use automatically by the system.

Here's the most basic form of this technique:

collectionView.register(UICollectionViewCell.self, forCellWithReuseIdentifier: "Cell")

That registers a basic collection view cell, which you can then customize in code if you want to. You can then dequeue a cell with this:

func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, cellForItemAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UICollectionViewCell {
    let cell = collectionView.dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier: "Cell", for: indexPath)
    return cell
}

If a cell doesn't already exist that can be re-used, a new one will be created automatically.

As you might imagine, you will most of the time want to create your own custom UICollectionViewCell subclass and use that instead, but the code is the same – just use your class name instead.

If you're working with Interface Builder, all this work is done for you by creating prototype cells.