UITableView set background color

1. Open Storyboard
2. Select your UITableView
3. Open Attribute inspector
4. Scroll to View group
5. Select background color for entire table.

If you want the cell background color to continue to alternate, then you need to lie about how many rows are in the table. Specifically, in tableView:numberOfRowsInSection you need to always return a number that will fill the screen, and in tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath, return a blank cell for rows that are beyond the end of the table. The following code demonstrates how to do this, assuming that self.dataArray is an NSArray of NSStrings.

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
    if ( self.dataArray.count < 10 )
        return( 10 );
    else
        return( self.dataArray.count );
}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"SimpleCell"];

    if ( indexPath.row % 2 == 0 )
        cell.backgroundColor = [UIColor orangeColor];
    else
        cell.backgroundColor = [UIColor redColor];

    if ( indexPath.row < self.dataArray.count )
        cell.textLabel.text = self.dataArray[indexPath.row];
    else
        cell.textLabel.text = nil;

    return cell;
}