Pull to refresh UITableView without UITableViewController

I'm trying to implement a pull to refresh feature in a UITableView within a UIViewController. I can't use a UITableViewController because I want the UITableView to be a smaller subview in the view controller, with some other stuff above it. I assume this is possible, but has anyone seen an implementation of it?

Add a refresh control directly to a UITableView without using a UITableViewController:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()
    let refreshControl = UIRefreshControl()
    refreshControl.addTarget(self, action: #selector(refresh(_:)), for: .valueChanged)

    if #available(iOS 10.0, *) {
        tableView.refreshControl = refreshControl
    } else {
        tableView.backgroundView = refreshControl
    }
}

@objc func refresh(_ refreshControl: UIRefreshControl) {
    // Do your job, when done:
    refreshControl.endRefreshing()
}

Objective-C:

This is how you can implement pull to refresh for table view. Same as in the case of collection view. Just replace table view alloc with collection view.

UITableView *tableViewDemo  =  [[UITableView alloc]init];
tableViewDemo.frame = CGRectMake(0,0,self.view.frame.size.width,self.view.frame.size.height);
tableViewDemo.dataSource =  self;
tableViewDemo.delegate =  self;
[self.view addSubView: tableViewDemo];
    
UIRefreshControl *refreshController = [[UIRefreshControl alloc] init];
[refreshController addTarget:self action:@selector(handleRefresh:) forControlEvents:UIControlEventValueChanged];
[tableViewDemo addSubview:refreshController];

#pragma mark - Handle Refresh Method

-(void)handleRefresh : (id)sender
{
   NSLog (@"Pull To Refresh Method Called");
   [refreshController endRefreshing];
}

This solution from @berik works fine but the UIController is displayed on top of the UITableViewController. The way to fix it is doing this change:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    let refreshControl = UIRefreshControl()
    refreshControl.addTarget(self, action: "refresh:", forControlEvents: .ValueChanged)
    tableView.backgroundView = refreshControl // <- THIS!!!
}

func refresh(refreshControl: UIRefreshControl) {
    // Do your job, when done:
    refreshControl.endRefreshing()
}

I've implemented EGORefreshTableHeaderView with a UIViewController and a simple table view, the trick is that a in the places where EGO takes a scroll view as a parameter, if you look the table view itself inherits from scroll view.

It only requires that and a few extra connections :)

Hope this helps.

It seems that if you create the UIRefreshControl inside the viewController's loadView method everything works fine. The UIRefreshControl behaves as it should. Tested with iOS 7.1 and iOS 8.2

I ended up using ODRefreshControl. It doesn't need any hack like the above tableView.backgroundView = refreshControl, works almost the same way, and gives a better looking UI.