Swift - UITableView set separator style

Question

How do i set the Separator Style of my UITableView in Swift? I want to get rid of the separator so that there is no grey line between the cells in my table view. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.Below is what I have already tried.

I have found this method in objective-C

[self.tableView setSeparatorStyle:UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone]

I tried my best to translate this to swift with

self.tableView.setSeparatorStyle = UITableViewCellSeparatorStyle.None

But this presents the error

'(UITableView, numberOfRowsInSection: Int) -> Int' does not have a member named 'setSeparatorStyle'

In the apple documentation it gives these declarations in objective-C

typedef enum : NSInteger  {


UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone ,
   UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleSingleLine ,
   UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleSingleLineEtched 
} UITableViewCellSeparatorStyle;

So I tried again to translate it to Swift using

 override func tableView(tableView: UITableView, setSeparatorStyle style: NSInteger) -> NSInteger {
    return UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone
}

But this just throws up more errors, "Use of unresolved identifier 'UITableViewCellSeparatorStyleNone"

Answer 1

To explain why you can't call setSeparatorStyle in Swift, I need to explain where that method comes from in Objective-C. If you search for it in the header (UITableView.h) you won't find it. The only thing declared is this:

@property (nonatomic) UITableViewCellSeparatorStyle separatorStyle;

setSeparatorStyle is the setter automatically generated for a property in Objective-C. Let's say you declare a property in Objective-C, like this:

@interface SomeClass: NSObject

@property (nonatomic) id someProperty;

@end

Objective-C will automatically generate a setter and getter method for that property, with the getter being the name of the property, and the setter being the name with set prefixed.

So you can call the getter like this:

[object someProperty]

And you can set the property like this: [object setSomeProperty:newValue]

Now, that's all great, but there's a shorter way to call the setter and getter, namely dot syntax, which looks like this:

object.someProperty = newValue; // setter

And the getter:

object.someProperty // getter

Now in Swift, this implicit generation of a setter in this setSomeProperty way doesn't exist anymore. It had always been a weird quirk of Objective-C, so Swift introduces a unified way to set and get properties. In Swift, there's only one way to set and get properties and it's using dot syntax, which is identical to the dot syntax in Objective-C.

So to actually answer your question, you need to remove the set part in setSeparatorStyle, and this would be your new code:

self.tableview.separatorStyle = UITableViewCellSeparatorStyle.none

Usually you don't have to write self, Swift is smart enough to realize you want to use self.tableView if there's only one variable named tableView in scope, so you can write

tableview.separatorStyle = UITableViewCellSeparatorStyle.none

And Swift is even smart enough to realize that what comes after the assignment operator (the equals sign, =) is probably a separator style, so you can just write .none.

tableview.separatorStyle = .none