iOS initialise view programmatically without constraining the position - ios

Question

Here is my problem, I have a scroll view scrollExerciseIndex that I use only as a scrolling bar, in this scroll view I place a UIView indexesView and I want it to be always at the center of the scroll view. For this I use layout constraints :
UIView * indexesView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame: CGRectMake(xPosition, 0, dimension*numberIndexes, dimension)];
[self.scrollExerciseIndex addSubview:indexesView];
[self.scrollExerciseIndex setContentSize:CGSizeMake(dimension*numberIndexes, dimension)];
if (xPosition != 0) {
NSLayoutConstraint * xCenterConstraint = [NSLayoutConstraint constraintWithItem:indexesView attribute:NSLayoutAttributeCenterX relatedBy:NSLayoutRelationEqual toItem:self.scrollExerciseIndex attribute:NSLayoutAttributeCenterX multiplier:1.0 constant:0];
[self.scrollExerciseIndex addConstraint:xCenterConstraint];
}
Here is the expected result :
Don't pay attention to all the element, just the bar at the bottom of the screen is my problem.
I have to create view programmatically because sometimes I will activate the constraints, sometimes not and I have to set the frame of the view dynamically. So for now I initialise the view indexesView like so :
UIView * indexesView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame: CGRectMake(xPosition, 0, dimension*numberIndexes, dimension)];
(I know, not very original)
I would like to know if there is a way to initialize the view programmatically but to say to auto-layout that it has no constraints on the position because right now if the screen turns in landscape mode there is a conflict as the scrollview's frame changes so the distance between the center of the scroll view (on which I set a constraint) and the position of the subview's frame (xPosition) is no longer the same.
As you can see, the view is no longer at the center of the scroll view and I have some constraints broken.
Will attempt to recover by breaking constraint
NSLayoutConstraint:0x7bed6c50 UIView:0x7bed6ad0.centerX == UIScrollView:0x7e273200.centerX
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

Ok, I found what I was looking for by reading a book about Audio-Layout.
My problem was that audio layout would create constraints behind my back automatically. When using AutoLayout a type of constraints is created from non-autoLayout specifications (The used to describe interface when auto layout didn't exist). So constraints are created using the initial frame of the view. The only thing I had to do was :
[indexesView setTranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints:NO];
to disable this creation of constraints from the frame, and then recreate explicitly the constraints for width and height if needed (which wasn't the case for me, but I still made the test) like so :
`NSLayoutConstraint * widthConstraint = [NSLayoutConstraint constraintWithItem:indexesView attribute:NSLayoutAttributeWidth relatedBy:NSLayoutRelationEqual toItem:nil attribute:0 multiplier:1.0 constant:widthValue];
NSLayoutConstraint * heightConstraint = [NSLayoutConstraint constraintWithItem:indexesView attribute:NSLayoutAttributeHeight relatedBy:NSLayoutRelationEqual toItem:nil attribute:0 multiplier:1.0 constant:heightValue];
[indexesView addConstraint: heightConstraint];
[indexesView addConstraint: widthConstraint];`
When adding constraints programmatically, don't forget to call : [indexesView setNeedsUpdateConstraints]; so the constraints are recalculated only when needed.
Last info that I read and can be useful in general, when adding a lot of constraints, the apple doc specifies that it is more efficient to use the method :
[myView addConstraints:(NSArray<NSLayoutConstraints *> *)] than to call addConstraint: for each constraint.
Hope it can be useful to someone.