How to keep UIView at relative distance from other after resizing? - objective-c

Question

I have five UIView on a UIScrollView. All of them with the same width. Each view has other subviews that resize its height according to the content assigned, thus making the parent UIView and the UIScrollView resizable as well. I am trying to keep the 5 UIView separated from each other at a certain "Padding" distance even after resizing. What I do right now is set the position of the origin.y and the height of each UIView when layoutSubviews is called. Is there an easier way to do this?
I have tried to set their position on creation like: CGRectMake(0, aboveView.frame.origin.y + aboveView.frame.size.height + Padding, width, 0) and setting its autoresizingMask to UIViewAutoresizingMaskTopMargin. Hoping that when I call sizeToFit on the main UIView, all the UView will set their positions relative to the view above them.

Answer 1

Overriding layoutSubviews is the right way to do this. UIKit doesn't have any built-in layout management that can do it for you.
However, you might not realize that UIScrollView sends itself layoutSubviews each time it scrolls - on every frame of the scrolling. That may be a lot more often than you need! You don't want to do a lot of work in a UIScrollView's layoutSubviews if you can avoid it.
To avoid doing extra layout, I suggest you set up your view hierarchy like this:
UIScrollView
ContainerView with layoutSubviews method
content view 1
content view 2
content view 3
content view 4
content view 5
Use a standard UIScrollView. Give it one subview, which is a custom UIView subclass (I called it ContainerView in my example). The ContainerView has your five content views as its subviews.
When you assign new content to one of your five content views, send sizeToFit to that content view. If the view's size changes, UIKit should automatically send layoutSubviews to its superview - the ContainerView. The ContainerView's layoutSubviews method adjusts the position of its subviews to maintain the padding between them, and then sets the contentSize of its parent - the UIScrollView.
- (void)layoutSubviews {
CGRect myFrame = CGRectZero;
for (UIView *subview in self.subviews) {
CGRect frame = subview.frame;
if (myFrame.size.height > 0) {
frame.origin.y = myBounds.size.height + Padding;
subview.frame = frame;
}
myFrame = CGRectUnion(myFrame, frame);
}
self.frame = myFrame;
UIScrollView *scrollView = self.superview;
scrollView.contentSize = myFrame.size;
}
This way, you don't do any extra work just because the scroll view scrolled. You only lay out your content views when the content actually changes.