UITableView - Delayed update when using sections

Question

I've been searching for a few days, and have continued to learn from reading the apple docs and various tutorials, but there's a problem which I can't seem to get a handle on.

I have a simple app that keeps track of projects, with a single Core Data Entity (ProjectEntry). All the attributes are strings at the moment. It's basically a combination of Paul Hegarty's Core Data lectures and Tim Roadley's web tutorial.

I can add and save Entities and populate a tableview with the data. For the moment, I'm using the CoreDataTableViewController subclass that Hegarty provides in the lecture. I'm mentioning that because...

When my UITableView isn't divided into sections, the new information "instantly" appears in the UI after adding a new entry. However, when I add sections ( via sectionNameKeyPath), the new data still saves, but shows up only after refreshing several times OR waiting 30 seconds before refreshing(via a pull-to-refresh mechanism, which Hegarty also provided).

The tableview delegate methods all seem to be working, as do the NSFetchedResultsController's methods. Using the Stanford/Hegarty CoreDataTableViewController subclass in the past has yielded success, and I've learned a lot reading through the implementation file itself.

The controllers are embedded in a Navigation controller, with the managed object context being passed among the controllers via the prepareForSegue method. Some simple logging shows me the managed object context, initially obtained via a UIManagedDocument, is being successfully passed along.

I've tried the [self.tableview reloadData] and/or the beginUpdates/endUpdates in viewWillAppear, but the delay persists.

What is it about dividing the tableview into sections that's causing the delay? Would calling reloadSections on the tableview be necessary? Like I said, the entries are saved with Core Data and the fetchedResultsController populates the non-sectioned tableview instantly...

It's probably something obvious that I'm just missing, but any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Warren Burton's comment above made me re-check if my managed object context behavior was consistent while being passed among the view controllers via the prepareForSegue method.

So, as mentioned in my last comment above, it seems to solve the problem for the moment:

from above: The initial view controller is non-tableview, which can segue to a UIViewController to add a ProjectEntry, or segue to a UITableViewController which lists saved project entries. This initial view controller creates or uses the UIManagedDocument. By setting a one-line check to see if the UIManagedDoc is being used in this initial view controller's viewWillAppear method, the "delay" in displaying new section data in the tableview seems to stop. I'll test it some more before saying the issue is solved. This way, the shared managed object contexts seem better "bound together" via the managed doc - vapul