Mastering UITableView Content Insets

When, why and how

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

UITableView is a fundamental iOS component, but managing it can be tricky.

Dealing with extra spacing, floating buttons and ensuring content isn’t covered by UI elements can be challenging.

One of the tools in our development toolkit is contentInset and I’ll cover that in this article.

I’ll put a demo project on https://github.com/stevencurtis/SwiftCoding/tree/master/DemoContentInserts, and I hope that helps things for you too.

Understanding contentInset

The contentInset property of UIScrollView (which UITableView inherits) allows you to add extra padding around the scrollable content without affecting the table’s constraints.

Example:

tableView.contentInset = UIEdgeInsets(top: 100, left: 0, bottom: 0, right: 0)

Ensures that the content starts *lower* than the default position (the top inset).

In the following image the background of the UITableView is set to .green so you can see the inset at the top of the UITableView.

The thing is you wouldn’t usually be able to see that inset at the top of the table unless you scroll to see it. If you *initially* want the inset to be shown at…