How can you display rows in 'dynamic' sizes using tableview of Corona SDK

Question

I am using tableview to display a list of items e.g.

list = 
[
   {name='bob',
    description='really long description that can be multiple rows',
    image='an image from my server',
    },
    ...
]

the above is just an example. I got my data from my server, including images of variable sizes. My question is how do I display the correct row size(height) once I got image from the server. I understand that I can wait until all data and image has been downloaded from server. Then precompute the height. But I want to be able to display the text first (as texts are more likely to be firstly downloaded), then once there is an image in it, I download it again. After the image is downloaded, I want to resize the row height. How can I do that?

Answer 1

Create a multi-line display.newText() of the width you expect to put in the table view. When the object is created, grab it's height and then remove the object. Use that height + some padding for the row height. There may be performance issues with this, so as an alternate, keep the text object and pass it in as a parameter when you create the row.