I have previously worked in Windows phone and see that every control in windows phone has an Auto property, meaning occupy the size of the content.
I see that in iOS such a property does not exist. When there are dynamic data to be bound to a UILabel, I always need to calculate the height of the data and then assign to the UILabel. This takes a good amount of time and bit painful. Is not there an Auto property or am I missing anything here?
iOS has AutoLayout which is really helpful, get familiar with it.
Click on the Label
Click on the pin constraints button (little square button)
Add your custom LEFT, RIGHT, TOP margins or LEFT, RIGHT, BOTTOM margins
Click on "Add 3 Constraints"
Set number of Lines to 0 which means as much lines as view needs
Then you probably got warning lines, but you can solve them
Just click on fix constraints button (little triangle button)
Click update frames
UPDATE
Important: the answer to your question is to PUT NUMBER OF LINES TO 0 you can use that UILabel with 0 lines(which is autosizing) with frames and AutoLayout. AutoLayout is just a friendly suggestion that can be helful to setup views. Also put Line Breaking Word Wrap
Here you go also with some useful links for working with AutoLayout. AutoLayout is great because you don't care anymore what size is the screen, what orientation has the device at that moment. You just need to setup everything correctly and everything works amazingly but if your setup is wrong then AutoLayout might become your enemy. So start learning and experiencing right now.
Very good point to Begin learning AutoLayout
If Your are being lazy, start from video tutorial series
Great iOS7+ table view tutorial with autoresizing cells
Also check out this Stack Overflow discussion
You need to familiarize yourself with Auto Layout:
Auto Layout dynamically calculates the size and position of all the
views in your view hierarchy, based on constraints placed on those
views.
Just give top, left and right constraints and make label's numberOfLines to 0. That's it. Label's height will resize automatically.
Related
I am trying to create a simple UI that works on all devices (obviously) and I haven't had much success. The program consists of two labels, a button, an image view and a textfield, I am also using a universal storyboard.
I implemented a top constraint, horizontally centred and fixed the width and height for all labels, buttons and textfields. The only exception I made with the image view was that instead of implementing a top constraint, I used a bottom one instead as I have found that utilising the former would result in it being only partially displayed. I would then switch from the universal storyboard to one with base values. From their I would delete the existing constraints and add new ones after moving the UI elements to their new locations on the different sized screen.
When I run my app on an iPhone 4S, the layout, whilst mostly correct, is still not perfect (i.e. a label is far too close to the image). Does anyone know how I can make my layouts look correct? I have been following this guide, Adaptive Layout Tutorial in iOS 9.
Thanks so much for your help!
[Example of the constraints for the picture1
I am not sure how familiar are you with autolayout, therfore I'd suggest you watch Stanford university lecture regarding autolayout.
In short, according to the lecture and after looking at your picture, you should almost never set constraints with actual numbers. Use "Standart value" and when you can't choose "Standart value" write 0.
I'd recommend watching the above lecture and the rest of the examples in there.
Your label has 2 problematic constraints
1. Top space (30 points) to "how old is your dog"
2. Top space (28 points) to button
That means that your button is 2 points height (really small!!)
Or - because the button has already a fixed height, the label and the text field are too close (and maybe even overlaps the button)
You should delete the top space constrain (to "How old is your dog") and do something else, or give it more points height
Good luck!
I was trying to practice Auto Layout in iOS, and I started with very simple UI. Please see image for understanding my problem.
All the text files are in middle of screen (I have deliberately kept on guide line), still you can see in preview, controls are not fully shown. I have not chosen specific size. Size is 'Inferred' still I am not able to see all the controls on UI.
I tried both adding and removing Auto Layout, but no luck. What should I do to create generic UI which will work with all the sizes of iPhone and iPad.
This image is without use of Auto Layout.
After enable autolayout and size classes you have to apply autolayout constraints.
Autolayout is a detail topic. Few basic things when applying autolayout is:
UI element need four constraints.
position x
Position y
height
width
So you will select first label (Number 1). Then press control and drag to superview. You will be provide options. Select Leading space (This will handle x position)
This is the way you can press control and drag:
http://www.appcoda.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/auto-layout-login-trailing.gif
Go to size inspector. You can see the constraint.
Press edit and change its value to 25(for test).
similarly control and drag again to superview and select Top space. (This will set y position for label)
This is simple way for the above taken from AppCoda
http://www.appcoda.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/auto-layout-control-drag.gif
You can change the value of these constraints according to your need.
UILabel and uitextfield get width and height from their content size. So don't need width and height constraints.
Now when you preview on any device this label will be stick on top left side of screen.
So this is a complete mechanism. You have to apply constraint to every ui element.
Below is a link to very comprehensive tutorial by
http://www.raywenderlich.com/115440/auto-layout-tutorial-in-ios-9-part-1-getting-started-2
At start this tutorial tried to create three views using autolayout. At the end it shows very similar scenario like yours by applying constraints to button and labels.
The problem here is that your constraints are not set correctly to work with every size of iPhone and iPad. You are setting the leading edge constraint to be a fixed size from your view controller's view to the subviews.
The simplest way to solve this issue would be to have a container view that you center in the view controller's view and then use constraints to set 'Center X Alignment Constraint' and 'Center Y Alignment Constraint' to set the container view's center to that of the view controller and then add your subviews to the container view.
As a side note auto layout has a reputation of being hard to learn, you have to put the time in to learn it, I would start with Apple's Auto Layout Guide.
I'm wondering if xCode auto layout / constraints are really as frustrating as I think, or am I just not understanding them. For example, I started with this basic label in the view controller:
Fair enough. A box with text that has equal margins on the left/right and a smaller top margin. Now when I run any size device, that gets skewed/cut off from the device view. So right away for some reason Xcode thinks that despite me putting the entire label in the view controller, it things it should display halfway off the screen. Don't get it but okay, so I went ahead and added auto layout constraits to the right, left and top margins. The result is:
So it centered it, which is nice, but now it just ignores the fact that I made the width larger and it just shrinks it down anyways? For something so simple this seems to be very...unreliable. I then added the "aspect ratio" constraint and it seemed to look fine in all of the devices...finally!
I curiously also simply tried to get rid of all those, and simply add the "aspect ratio" constraint and the "horizontal center in container" constraint. On the main storyboard preview (not the simulator) it looked like this:
Not what I'm looking for, as it's not stretched downward like I want, they shrunk it again. However...when actually running it in the simulator...it looks perfect, the way I want it to in the first picture of the view controller.
Why the preview and simulator differed, I suppose (from reading other questions) it's because there were a few warnings after I added these. One was that the horizontal and vertical positions are one initially and will be different at run time. But when I ran it, it definitely held the initial ones and not the ones they said it would be at run time. It also told me that vertical position was ambiguous...well yeah I only set a center and aspect ratio...pretty obvious and not sure how I'd even solve that error. It solves it when I delete the horizontal center...but now it's not centered which is a step back from what I wanted.
Long story short, how do I deal with this. My previews and simulations aren't accurate with each other even for the simplest auto layout specifics. Apps nowadays are so complicated and on every device they scale and work beautifully, and this seems to not agree with even just one label.
Does anybody have any good articles, advice, or anything that would help me? This auto layout stuff seems to be so picky and that's really all I know so I have to deal with it. And don't even get me started on why the text doesn't scale with the label...why would I want the text on an iphone 4 to be the same on an ipad even when my label is increasing in size with the device?
A lot to go through, but it's just very frustrating and I can't see myself doing much else before I try to understand these basics. Thank you and much appreciated.
I think you have to understand constraints first...without that you always made things frustrating....For understand the constraints you can check this links
http://www.raywenderlich.com/50317/beginning-auto-layout-tutorial-in-ios-7-part-1
http://mathewsanders.com/designing-adaptive-layouts-for-iphone-6-plus/
It takes a bit of experience to get used to it, but once you get it, you get it for good and it's very easy.
Basically the rule of thumb is don't trust exactly what you see in storyboard when it comes to the size of the actual object. Say you have a UIView centered horizontally and vertically in the main view. True it will try to keep the size of that UIView but center it in any size device, but I would never just leave it at that. I would either:
Add width and height constraints
Add a width/height constraint and an aspect ratio constraint
Add a width constraint and top and bottom constraints
Add a height constraint and leading and trailing constraints
Add top, bottom, leading, and trailing constraints
In other words, the exact size of the object should always be determined via the constraints, and not by the UIView itself. This gets away from the finicky behavior and also ensures that it's displayed on any device exactly the way you intend it to.
I have been struggling for days with this implementation, and even though I have tried to do every tutorial I found on the web, I still cannot make things work the way I want.
Basically, I am trying to put my login form in a scrollview, so that it takes the whole screen at first (and on all iPhones / iPads), and if the keyboard appears everything should move. The problem IS, my view doesn't take the whole screen... Either it is too large, or too high, even though in Interface Builder everything seams correct (from layout to constraints). Below and image of the layout I want to achieve (I am using an universal storyboard, with Size Classes and Autolayout enabled):
http://img4.hostingpics.net/pics/829115app.png
Can someone point me out on achieving this layout ?
Thanks in advance.
I would suggest pinning top, leading and trailing spaces of your scroll view to its superview. And set a bottom space constraint less or equal to the keyboard's height if you set it to 0, the scroll view won't be able to resize.
With your form layout set vertical center constraints and top space to superview constraints for your top label being more or equal than the distance you set in the IB, and then you can set relative space constraints between each of the components.
Hope I answered your question.
Edit: Just the provided project and got it working. I think the problem is caused by it being a containerView inside a scrollView. And both the container and the scrollViews content view adapt to the size of its subviews. Because of that, setting relative constraints won't help.
What I did was to set an explicit size (screen's size) to the containerView and setting setTranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints(true) to it.
I modified your project and uploaded it here
As seen in the link below theres some margin/padding on the top, bottom, left and right part of a cell. How do I set it to zero? I tried returning CGRectMake(0,0,0,0) in the -(CGRect)layoutMargins margin of the UITableViewCell's lifecycle.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rl95v2688k70u0j/Screenshot%202014-10-13%2003.29.08.png?dl=0
If you are using AutoLayout (which seems to be the case according to your screenshot) you can reach this be modifying the constraints (the blue lines which you see in Interface Builder). AutoLayout can be tough to deal with at the beginning, but if follows quite logical structures. If you want to get down on the nitty gritty of it and understand how it works I can recommend you this excellent video tutorial from Scotty on the topic.
Another simple way would be to turn off AutoLayout and just set the label to the same size of your cell, so your approach with CGRectMake isn't all that wrong, except that you need to keep in mind that it takes as parameters: x and y coordinates (which you want to set to 0 as you already did) but also width and height (which you also set to 0, but probably want to set equal to the cell's size).
AutoLayout can be turned off in Interface Builder by removing the checkmark in the following picture: