Parallax header on a one-page screen in iOS using Interface Builder - ios

Question

In an iOS 8 app, I'm trying to create a screen that has a "parallax header", i.e., an image header that grows as you pull down. I would like to do this using only constraints in Interface Builder, if possible.
Here is a nice guide by Pete Hare on how to do such a thing, and I've also had good help at looking at this example project by Bill Carson. However, contrary to these projects, this is not the header to a scrolling area that's taller than the screen, like a Table View; it's just one page. And for some reason, I can't get things to work in my app. I find Scroll Views in Interface Builder rather confusing to begin with. Could anyone walk me through the steps?

Answer 1

Why, certainly! First we'll set up a view controller with a scroll view.
Create an empty View Controller. Give its initial View the Xcode Specific Label Root View so we can tell things apart.
Add a Scroll View. Resize it to fill the view controller, and add constraints for Leading, Trailing, Top and Bottom to equal the superview's corresponding edges. (I do this by control-dragging from Scroll View to View in the Document Outline, hold down the Option and Shift key and then select all four edges, and then Add Constraints.)
Enable Bounce Vertically in the Scroll View's Attribute Inspector.
Add a simple View to the Scroll View and pin its edges to its superview -- the Scroll View -- in the exact same way as we did with the Scroll View to Root View (although this time we don't need to hold Option key when adding constraints). Give the new view the Xcode Specific Label Scrolling Content.
Xcode is not happy, it says Scroll View is missing constraints: "needs constraints for X position or width" and "needs constraints for Y position or height". Let it automatically add missing constraints, it will add constraints for the center of Scrolling Content to the center of Scroll View, in X and Y directions.
By setting a background color to the Scrolling Content, we can now run and confirm that the scroll view with vertical bounce is working as intended. Nice. Now, let's add the header.
Add a nice header image to the project assets, and drag an Image View to the Scrolling Content. Label it Header Image. Select your image asset as the Header Image's image. Drag the corners of the Image View so that it is aligned to the top, left and right edges of your view. Now let's go through the constraints to set on the Image View.
We want the top edge to be fixed to the top of the screen, regardless of how the user is scrolling. So we need it to be pinned to something outside of the Scroll View. You may try fixing it to the Root View's top edge, but unfortunately, that does not work for some reason. What does work is to pin it to the Top Layout Guide. You'll do this easiest by control-dragging in the Document Outline, between the Header Image and the Top Layout Guide and accpet the suggested constant.
The bottom edge of the Header Image needs to be pinned to something inside the Scroll View. Ultimately, we'd like it to be set to a fixed distance from the top of the Scrolling Content -- but Interface Builder won't let us do that. You can only set it to some distance from the bottom of the Scrolling Content, which is not very practical since you will then have to take the height of the device into account. What we instead do is to add another view directly beneath the Header Image, pin that view's top edge to some distance from the Scrolling Content's top edge, and then pin the Header Image's bottom edge to our new view's top edge. This could be a regular View that holds the rest of your user interface below the header. But for this example (and to demonstrate a later point in this guide), we'll use a label. Add a label directly beneath Header Image and give it three constraints: pin it's top edge to the Header Image's bottom edge, it's top edge also to the Scrolling Content's top edge, and it's center X to the Scrolling Content's center X. The distance between the label's top edge and Scrolling Content's top edge will be the height of the image in the non-dragged state. This unfortunately needs to be set to a constant in the storyboard file -- we'll have to update it programmatically. More on that later.
The last part is easy: pin the leading and trailing edges of the Header Image to the leading and trailing edges of the Scrolling Content.
Now, all our constraints are in place! If you run the app, you can see how it's working correctly constraintwise, but the image isn't scaling the way we expect it to. A couple of last tweaks before we're done.
In the Attribute Inspector, under View, set the Mode of the Image View to "Aspect Fill". That gives it the correct parallaxy behavior.
To set the height of the Header Image correctly, we need a little bit of code. First, make an outlet from the constraint between the label's top edge and the Scrolling Content's top edge -- the one we set to a fixed value -- to your View Controller's source file. Call it imageHeightConstraint. Also add an outlet from the Image View called headerImageView. A good place to update the constraint programmatically is in the viewWillLayoutSubviews View Controller delegate method. Here is some code in Objective C:
- (void)viewWillLayoutSubviews {
[super viewWillLayoutSubviews];
CGSize imageSize = self.headerImageView.image.size;
CGFloat heightForWidth = imageSize.height / imageSize.width;
CGRect screenBounds = [UIScreen mainScreen].bounds;
CGFloat screenWidth = CGRectGetWidth(screenBounds);
self.imageHeightConstraint.constant = screenWidth * heightForWidth;
}
Finally, you may notice that when scrolling up, the label -- or whatever content is underneath the header view -- is getting covered by it. This is solved by checking Clip Supbviews on the Image View's Attribute Inspector.
Whew!
(Note: I began writing this as a question and then kept writing while I solved it for myself. I guess it would do well with a little text pruning and some images, but maybe it will help someone...)