Setting UITableView with grouped style background in iOS

Setting the background of a UITableView is a simple operation in most cases. In my latest app, we set the background to a nice texture with a line like this:

self.tableView.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage: [UIImage imageNamed: @"myFancyBackground.png"]];

For some reason, when a UITableView with the grouped style is presented in a popover, this code does not work. It turns out that grouped table views have a custom backgroundView property. I don’t know why this property only takes precedence when the table is in a popover, but here’s how to fix it to display your custom background:

self.tableView.backgroundView = nil;
self.tableView.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage: [UIImage imageNamed: @"myFancyBackground.png"]];

Setting the backgroundView to nil doesn’t seem to have any ill side effects that I’ve noticed. Hopefully someone can correct me if I’m wrong.