Changing UITableView's section header/footer title without reloading the whole table view

Question

Is there any way to reload the section header/footer of a table view without calling [tableView reloadData];?

In fact, I want to show the number of cells in a table view's section in its section footer. The table view is editable and I delete or insert rows using

– insertRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation: – deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation: 

It seems that these methods do not update the section footer. Strangely, when I call these methods the table view data-source method

- (NSString *)tableView:(UITableView *)table titleForFooterInSection:(NSInteger)section  

is called (twice!) but it does not update the table view with the new values!!

Anyone has any idea how to fix this problem?

Answer 1

If you just have a basic text header or footer, you can access them directly:

[tableView footerViewForSection:indexPath.section].textLabel.text = [self tableView:tableView titleForFooterInSection:indexPath.section]; 

similarly for the header:

[tableView headerViewForSection:indexPath.section].textLabel.text = [self tableView:tableView titleForHeaderInSection:indexPath.section];