Setting UIView.transform to arbitrary translate CGAffineTransform does nothing - ios

Question

I have a UIView called container that I want to move (offset) using affine transfrom. This view contains UIImageView and is a subview of UICollectionViewCell.
So it should be simple:
container.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation(100, 200) //render container 100 points right and 200 points down
Instead it is very hard, because theat code does not do anything. The view is rendered excatly on the same place as if I delete that line. So I added 'print' to verify what affine translation was set:
container.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation(100, 200)
print(container.transform) //prints: CGAffineTransform(a: 1.0, b: 0.0, c: 0.0, d: 1.0, tx: 100.0, ty: 200.0)
That seems all right. So I tried rotating the container view instead with CGAffineTransformMakeRotation and it rotates the view just not around its center as it should according to documentation. I tried different combinations of translate, rotation and scale transforms just to find that the affine transformation matrixes set are OK, but attributes tx and ty seems to be ignored and a, b, c and d seems to be using different anchor point then the centre of the view (cannot say what that point is).
Any ideas on what can be causing this and how to fix it?

Answer 1

There must be something like auto layout messing things up for you. In the absence of outside influence, setting a view's affine transform to CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation(100, 200) will shift it right 100 points and down 200. I verified this by making a new Single View Project in Xcode and changing the viewDidLoad method in the ViewController.swift class to:
override func viewDidLoad()
{
super.viewDidLoad()
view.backgroundColor = UIColor.blueColor();
let container = UIView(frame: CGRectMake(0,0,100,100));
container.backgroundColor = UIColor.greenColor();
container.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeTranslation(100, 200);
view.addSubview(container);
}
As expected this makes the green container view appear 100 points to the right and 200 points down, even though its frame is (0,0,100,100).
So please check for auto layout and other such things that might influence the placement of this view, and if you can't find anything please post more code. Also, if your container view doesn't have a background color, please give it one so that you can see its position directly, instead of deducing its position by looking at the image view.
n.b. Setting a view's transform doesn't actually move the view itself, it just changes how/where it draws its content.