CALayer and Off-Screen Rendering - cocoa-touch

Question

I have a Paging UIScrollView with a contentSize large enough to hold a number of small UIScrollViews for zooming, The viewForZoomingInScrollView is a viewController that holds a CALayer for drawing a PDF page onto. This allows me to navigate through a PDF much like the ibooks PDF reader.
The code that draws the PDF (Tiled Layers) is located in:
- (void)drawLayer:(CALayer *)layer inContext:(CGContextRef)ctx;
And simply adding a 'page' to the visible screen calls this method automatically. When I change page there is some delay before all the tiles are drawn, even though the object (page) has already been created.
What i want to be able to do is render the next page before the user scrolls to it, thus preventing the visible tiling effect. However, i have found that if the layer is located offscreen adding it to the scrollview doesn't call the drawLayer.
Any Ideas/common gotchas here?
I have tried:
[viewController.view.layer setNeedsLayout];
[viewController.view.layer setNeedsDisplay];
NB: The fact that this is replicating the ibooks functionally is irrelevant within the context of the full app.

Answer 1

As i mentioned above, CALayers don't render if they are offscreen.
I ended up not drawing the PDF directly to the layer but instead, rendered the PDF page to an image when i needed (renders 1 page plus and minus one of the focused page)
Here is the render code:
-(UIImage *)renderPDFPageToImage:(int)pageNumber//NSOPERATION?
{
//you may not want to permanently (app life) retain doc ref
CGSize size = CGSizeMake(x,y);
UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(size);
CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
CGContextTranslateCTM(context, 0, 750);
CGContextScaleCTM(context, 1.0, -1.0);
CGPDFPageRef page; //Move to class member
page = CGPDFDocumentGetPage (myDocumentRef, pageNumber);
CGContextDrawPDFPage (context, page);
UIImage * pdfImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();//autoreleased
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
return pdfImage;
}