How to reload a UITableView while preserving selections

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws October 10th 2019

When you call reloadData() on a UITableView it will refresh all cells from your data source, but it will also lose any selections the user has made.

If you want to reload your table view while also saving and restoring any selections, you should take a copy of the indexPathsForSelectedRows property before the reload, then re-apply those selections after calling reloadData().

This can be put into a simple UITableView extension for easier use:

extension UITableView {
    /// Reloads a table view without losing track of what was selected.
    func reloadDataSavingSelections() {
        let selectedRows = indexPathsForSelectedRows

        reloadData()

        if let selectedRow = selectedRows {
            for indexPath in selectedRow {
                selectRow(at: indexPath, animated: false, scrollPosition: .none)
            }
        }
    }
}

With that in place, you can now call yourTableView.reloadDataSavingSelections() to try it out.