Delete a row from a table in Objective-C

Here's a gotcha I came across while deleting a row from a UITableView in iOS. Basically, the order you delete the record from the view and the underlying data source can be crucial.

To delete an item from a UITableView, for this example, I'm going to assume your delegate and datasource are both set to be your TableViewController. This would be pretty common anyway. To give your tableview delete/insert support is actually very straight-forward.

1. Simply implement the tableView:commitEditingStyle:forRowAtIndexPath: method (on the data source - in this case the controller). 
2. You must then send deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation: or insertRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation: to the table view to direct it to adjust its presentation. 
3. And then update the corresponding data-model array by either deleting the referenced item from the array or adding an item to the array. 

This is described in the official documentation here

BUT WAIT! If you attempt to remove the item from the view first, then the data source you may run into an error. Something like this (for example if you tried to delete 1 row from a list of 10)...

Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInternalInconsistencyException', reason: 'Invalid update: invalid number of rows in section 0. The number of rows contained in an existing section after the update (10) must be equal to the number of rows contained in that section before the update (10), plus or minus the number of rows inserted or deleted from that section (0 inserted, 1 deleted).

Internally deleteRowsAtIndexPaths calls the tableView's numberOfRowsInSection. If the data source has not changed then this will return the same count as before the delete (or insert for that matter). The runtime does not like this and tells you as much in the exception - it expected something to change.

So, simply remove the item from the underlying data source first and then call deleteRowsAtIndexPaths. Which is the other way around to the way it is described in the Apple docs (which are usually excellent). Here's some code...

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
    // Return the number of rows in the section.
    return [recentImages count];
}

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView commitEditingStyle:(UITableViewCellEditingStyle)editingStyle forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {

    // Delete from underlying data source first!
    recentImages = [recentImages removeObjectAtIndex:indexPath.row];
    
    // Then perform the action on the tableView
    if (editingStyle == UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete)
    {   
        [tableView beginUpdates];
        [tableView deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:[NSArray arrayWithObject:indexPath]
                             withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade];        
        [tableView endUpdates];
    }
    
    // Finally, reload data in view
    [self.tableView reloadData];
}