I'm trying to understand how autolayout works under XCode6, but there's a lot of mysterious things that runs away from my mind. Autolayout and constraints philosofy can be very hard to learn, but I realized that life can be easier using these tools...
For your information, I need to build a chat view with a table (the messages) and a view containing a text field (the send message pane) nested in a UIView that is again nested in a UIScrollView, so I can shift up the scroll view as the keyboard appears under the textfield.
I read a lot of tutorials and watched a lot of video until I found the useful tutorial Using UIScrollView with Auto Layout in iOS. There's a Xcode project in Github of what the tutorial explains, too.
In his tutorial, Mike Woelmer tells that
One of the big pain points with the old way of setting up a
UIScrollView was communicating the content size to the scroll view. It
was fairly straightforward to calculate your content size if the
content in the UIScrollView was an image. But it was not as easy if
your scroll view included a mixed bag of buttons, labels, custom
views, and text fields. Lengthy code adjustments were needed to
reflect constant changes in device rotations and phone size
differences.
So Mike explains the way to adapt the UIView, using placeholder and forcing the view inside the scrollview to fits the device's screen, creating in viewDidLoad some NSLayoutConstraint:
The solution is to look outside the scroll view and attach a
constraint to the view controller’s main view. This cannot be done in
interface builder, so we will have to write some code. Interface
builder is still complaining, though, so we have to add a placeholder
width constraint to make it happy.
I tried to use parts of the code of the tutorial for my project, but I cannot get a working view controller for my needs (I always get errors). Which is the best approach to do this? Am I on the right road?
Last but not least, I'm italian, so pardon for my english. If something is not clear enough, please leave me a comment.
Basically you have to set both alignment and size constraints in order for Autolayout to take care of the rest for you. If you don't provide enough information you get warning. If you provide conflicting information you get errors.
You need basically to provide enough information for Autolayout to calculate the UIView frame property (i.e., x-position, y-position, width, height).
For example, by providing the distance constraints from the top, right, bottom, and left edges, Autolayout has enough information to draw that UIView's frame rectangle. But you could also provide just the distance constraints from the top and left edges and then provide a size and height constraint.
You can also configure the key constraints you need and then click 'resolve auto layout issues' and choose 'add missing constraints' though sometimes it doesn't give you what you want. It is better to understand that how Autolayout accomplishes what I described above.
If you mess up, it's usually easier to clear all the constraints and start over. Do it a few times and you'll get the hang of it.
Related
I am creating an OSX Desktop application and am struggling with autolayout. I would like to create a quad view where four subviews are anchored to the corners of the parent window. When the window expands I would like to expand the subviews "toward the center" so that the border between them remains fixed and each subview expands equally. I have no idea how to do this.
Expressed another way, I would like the "border" between these views to remain the same no matter the window size. I'm fine with fixing one dimension.
This seems simple but I'm struggling mightily with autolayout and I just don't understand how to express it in terms of constraints that "distribute" the space equally between neighboring views. How to do this? Code is welcome, but really I just want an explanation of the theory of operation. The closest I've been able to come is to specify a required constraint between the boxes, but then they resize (arbitrarily?) to satisfy this constraint, which isn't what I want at all.
I've read through the Apple docs on autolayout and constraints several times but can't seem to make the leap to implementing real world layouts such as these. I've found a handful of tutorials but they seem a bit outdated and/or focused on rants about IB versus code for constraints (I don't care which method, as long as it works ;) ) Any help much appreciated!
Ah... the "secret" was creating a relative constraint between the views, or a "Equal Width" and "Equal Height" constraint. Each of the four should look more or less like:
The question may be similar with
Designing inside a scrollview in xcode 4.2 with storyboards
but none of the answer there makes sense at all.
Okay I created a new controller and I added a scrollView.
The very first thing I noticed is there is NOWHERE to specify the content size of the scrollView.
Not in attributes inspector, not in size inspector.
Then what?
I am expecting some larger than normal box where I can draw all the view I want to put in. There is no such thing either.
I am very frustated.
All the "tutorial" out there tell about how to fill scrollView using code.
Another thing I tried is to select controller go to size inspector and then choose FREEFORM.
Great. I still can't make that template big.
Should I do this in XIB instead? At least on that one I can have one huge UIView. Or what is the official way industry standard way of doing this? Is there a WWDC for this one?
Say I want to draw something like these:
I don't think you can get a tutorial on this as it is simply impossible in IB. As most people already commented out what you want to do here need to be done programmatically.
If you are using XIB you can set up all your content there. Under the size tab (in the inspector) you will need to change the height to fill all your content but you still need to set up your contentSize programmatically.
For storyboard I don't think it is possible to change the size of your scrollview in IB.
I have a problem. I want for each record in my core data database to draw an UIImage view on screen. But the problem is that I want to make a sort of grid. On the link below you see what I want to achieve.
picture
So my question is, how do I draw an image on screen in code. And place those images in a sort of a grid. using a collection view is no option, because the app should be running on all IOS devices.
While you could implement a custom UIView and implement the drawRect: method and draw UIImages there, I suggest just using multiple UIImageViews as subviews on your "main" view. Your view might be embedded in a UIScrollView, or you could use a UITableView with custom UITableViewCells. Whichever is easier is probably related to how you can interact with the view.
Building that one huge image view is something that I'd definitely try to avoid - it costs many many (probably unnecessary) memory, and it might be slow as well. Definitely not very flexible to handle, and a pain to update dynamically.
A quick cheat for something like this is to use a Table View and then in each cell to place another TableView but rotated at 90 degrees.
You can then use this second TableView to display the pictures etc...
This will give you a table that scrolls up and down and then each cell can scroll left to right.
I'd suggest subclassing UITableViewCell and setting it up as a UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDatasource.
You will also have to remember to rotate the content of these "sub"tables by 90 degrees also so that they are the right way up.
This sounds like a lot of work but if you push the management of the sub Tables into the cells then it actually becomes quite easy.
I have a window whose size I need to change when the user clicks on it. I am using [self setFrame:windowFrame display:YES animate:YES] to accomplish this.
Even though the window successfully changes size (I increase its height), it moves the contents of the window up with it. How do I prevent this from happening? I want the contents to remain in place.
I am on OSX Mountain Lion developing an app for OSX using Objective-C and Cocoa.
EDIT: Constraints and/or Springs and Struts will not work as I need to move the contents around after the window is resized.
Constraints and/or Springs and Struts will not work as I need to move the contents around after the window is resized.
In that case, you should use NSViewAnimation.
A single view animation can actually perform multiple animations to multiple views, and you can even do one to a window, despite the class's name and the fact that windows aren't views in Cocoa.
You create a view animation with initWithViewAnimations:, which takes an array of dictionaries. Each dictionary identifies the target (NSViewAnimationTargetKey) and what to do to it: Either change the target's frame (NSViewAnimationStartFrameKey and NSViewAnimationEndFrameKey) or fade the target in or out (NSViewAnimationEffectKey). For your case, you'll be changing the targets' frames.
When the user does the thing that causes the resize of the window, you'll need to compute the desired overall size of the window (taking care to adjust its frame's position so it doesn't grow off the screen), as well as the new frames—both positions and sizes—of your views. Everything that will move and/or change size, create a dictionary for it and throw it into the array. Then create the view animation.
An NSViewAnimation is a kind of NSAnimation, which provides all the methods for starting and stopping the animation, monitoring its progress, hooking into it, and chaining multiple NSAnimations together. If nothing else, you'll need to start the animation.
If you are using the Interface Builder to build these views, then I believe one approach is to set the "struts and springs." These are available under the "size inspector" and are the red arrows and bars above the "autosizing" label. Play around with these to get the effect that you want, but the general idea is that the arrows control how the size of the view adjusts to changes in the size of the parent view, and the bars control the relationship of the edges of the view to the edges of the parent view as the size changes.
In constraint-based layout, set the views around the edge of your window to be a fixed distance from their superview's edge.
Xcode will infer a lot of resizability from that; if anything still isn't resizing properly, adjust its constraints so that its width and/or height is no longer constant.
The easiest way is to move your views until blue lines show up in the editor. Each blue line corresponds to a rule in the HIG about how things should be lain out, and if you drop the view there, Xcode will create constraints matching those guidelines. For example, if you set a view 20 points from the right edge of its superview, you'll get a blue line for that, and if you drop the view there, you'll create a constraint that the view must remain that distance from that edge.
The superview isn't the only view with which you can create HIG-based constraints. You can also create guideline constraints between sibling views. For example, if you put a button next to another button at the appropriate distance, you'll get a blue line across that distance, and if you drop it, you'll create a constraint that those two buttons must remain that distance from each other.
If you want to do something really custom, the three buttons in the lower-right corner of the nib editor will let you create any constraint you want. What you have selected determines what constraints you can create; the nib editor's outline view will help you make sure you have the selection you want.
You are going to have to iterate through all of your subviews and change their frame positions based on the delta of your window frame.
so if you expand your window frame by 20 in all directions, all your subviews are going to have to increase their frame positions by (20,20) to offset the windows movement.
I'm trying to add a way for my app to display data in an easily comprehensible form. I tried doing this with graphs, but found it to be a bit awkward, so I'm off to find a better solution.
Here's a problem:
I want to show up to 30 days of data, with user reported events plotted against a timeline.
The events should align vertically, to visually provide a reference of when certain events cluster together.
To solve the problem, I thought of using a UITableView with a background which has a scale, and superimpose upon that background a set of "pins", indicating user events. As the table is scrolled, the events would align one under another, providing a good indication historic event development:
I know that this is possible to be done with a UIScrollView, where I can just position a series of rulers and add events as pins. In order to do this efficiently, I'll have to use Tiling, a technique that I don't have much experience with.
I'm interested in knowing if this is possible with a UITableView, where caching and tiling is already done for me.
I tried adding UIImageViews to a tableViewCell.backgroundview , but this does not produce the desired results. I'd like to be able to dynamically add any number of subviews to the table cell. I can do this by adding a certain pre-determined number of images to an .xib and then trying to reposition them, but this does not seem like an ideal solution.
Is what I'm trying to do possible with UITableView, or should I abandon these efforts and look at UIScrollView with tiling?
Thank you!
yes this should be possible. Add the ruler image to the background of the UITableViewCell.
Then create a subclass of UITableViewCell that takes an array of pins objects that it will place within its view. The pin objects would contain the pin image and a horizontal location on the scale. Then in the tableView dataSource method cellForRowAtIndexPath method you set the tableViewCell's pin array to the correct array (or NSSet) of pins.
To make it even more lightweight, you could draw the pins yourself in the UITableViewCell subclasses drawRect method. Then you could just pass the locations of the pins.
Good luck