Assertion Failure in UICollectionViewData indexPathForItemAtGlobalIndex

Finally! Ok, here's what was causing this crash for me.

As previously noted, I was creating supplementary views in order to provide custom-styled section headers for my collection view.

The problem is this: it appears that the indexPath of a supplementary view MUST correspond to the indexPath of an extant cell in the collection. If the supplementary view's index path has no corresponding ordinary cell, the application will crash. I believe that the collection view attempts to retrieve information for a supplementary view's cell for some reason during the update procedure. It crashes when it cannot find one.

Hopefully this will solve your problem too!

This is the proper workaround to this crash:

Each of your supplementary views are associated with a certain index path. If you don't have a cell at that index path (initial load, you've deleted the row, etc), return a height of 0 for your supplementary view via your layout's delegate.

So, for a flow layout, implement UICollectionViewDelegateFlowLayout's

(CGSize)collectionView:(UICollectionView *)collectionView layout:(UICollectionViewLayout*)collectionViewLayout referenceSizeForHeaderInSection:(NSInteger)section

method (and the corresponding footer method, if you're using footers) with the following logic

if ( you-have-a-cell-at-the-row-for-this-section )    return myNormalHeaderSize;else return CGSizeMake( 0,0 );

Hope this helps!

reloadData doesn't work for me, because the whole purpose of using performBatchUpdates is to get the changes animated. If you use reloadData you only refresh the data, but without animations.

So suggestions of "replace performBatchUpdates with reloadData" is pretty much saying "give up on what you're trying to do."

I'm sorry, I'm just frustrated because this error keeps coming up for me while I'm trying to do some great animated updates and my model is 100 % correct, it's some iOS magic inside getting broken and forcing me to change my solutions completely.

My opinion is that Collection Views are still buggy and can't do complicated animated refreshes, even though they should be able to. Because this used to be the same thing for Table Views but those are now pretty stable (it took time, though).

//Edit (Sep 1, 2013)The reported bug is closed now so this issues seems to have been resolved by Apple already.