How do I set a background image for a grouped table view?

Question

I've seen some iPhone applications that use a custom image as the background for a grouped UITableView, instead of the standard gray lines.

How is this achieved?

Answer 1

Here's what worked for me (and fairly simple once I figured it out ;)

1) Add a view in your app delegate and make it a subview of the window:

UIView *bgView = [[UIView alloc]initWithFrame:window.frame];

 bgView.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"screenBG.png"]];
 [window addSubview:bgView];
 [bgView release];

2) On each view controller .m file, under ViewDidLoad, set background color of that particular view to transparent (so the other bgView created above will show through):

self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];

And in my case, the view controller in step 2 was a tableviewcontroller. Looks great.

And BTW, doing the following in each view controller did NOT work well:

self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"screenBG.png"]];

So follow steps 1 and 2 above.

Hope this helps out, Tbone

Answer 2

Try this

- (void) viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];

    self.tableView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
    self.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage: [UIImage imageNamed:@"wallpaper.png"]];
    self.tableView.opaque = NO;
}

Answer 3

In another project (developed using 2.2.1) I did this by setting my UITableView's background opacity to 0%, and then simply layering a UIImageView behind it using Interface Builder. This allowed me to have a fixed background regardless of the table state. You can also set the background of the UITableView to be an image instead, but then the background scrolls with the table. (I don't have the code handy at the moment, but I got the tip a while back on the Apple developer forums).

Note that this can cause some performance issues. Apple discourages using transparency whenever possible because the GPUs on the pre-3GS models aren't particularly beefy.

Answer 4

You can use the +[UIColor colorWithPatternImage:(UIImage)] method like so:

self.tableView.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:[UIImage imageNamed:@"Background.png"]];