After banging my head against all the walls of the building, I have noticed that whenever I have a UICollectionView as a subview of my view controller's main view, the following holds:
If the collection view is the first subview in the "Structure" pane in Interface builder, the cells are pushed down by about 128 points (see images below:)
(red background is collection view)
However, if I add another view above the collection view, the item cells line up at the top (as expected), no extraneous margin:
...but it has to be placed above the collection view: If I re-arrange the views and place the dummy below the collection view, the bug resurfaces.
This collection view is horizontal scroll, one line (section). Ideally, the collection view height is the same as the cell height (no margin), so the bug caused the cells to not show at all. I had to try and enlarge the the collection view's canvas vertically to finally realize what was going on.
Is this a documented feature I am somehow missing, or is it a bug?
I fell like naming my dummy view "spacer.gif" and enjoying some late-nineties nostalgia.
ADDENDUM: I have further investigated and discovered that, the dummy view placed above the collection view is a necessary condition for it to work, but not sufficient. Moving it around (mostly to hide it) or adding/changing constraints on it makes the bug resurface in some cases. Very annoying, can't quite figure out the exact conditions...
Related
I'm trying to wrap my head around how to make the layout work as I want.
So the blue container is a view that will contain a bunch of rendered UIImageViews that will be added in viewDidLoad. The amount of subviews can vary, so sometimes there might be one row, sometimes two and maybe three.
I want the blue view container to wrap all subviews added, and the Table View should be right under the blue view container, and not overlap the toolbar at the bottom.
Here is a preview of my view.
I have a scroll view which works fine. Almost. I'm building in Any/Any. The problem is that the scroll view won't scroll past the view controller. I have a switch that is mostly in the view controller window, but the rest is off the box (not really sure how to describe it; it's in the view in the scroll view, but the view is longer than the view controller so part of it is hidden).
The scroll view will scroll down until it hits the part where the view controller would end if you were looking at it in Xcode. There is some more stuff under the switch (labels and another switch). To view these you have to forcefully scroll down. Xcode shows no constraint errors (little red circle with white arrow).
Hopefully this makes sense
A ScrollView needs to know the height and width of the content it is holding in order to know how much to scroll and which direction. Here is a quick read on how ScrollViews work in iOS: https://www.objc.io/issues/3-views/scroll-view/
You can set this programmatically using the contentSize property, but this requires you to know and or calculate the contentSize, which is pretty tedious in most cases.
The correct way of defining the contentSize in iOS is to define AutoLayout constraints in your View. Here is an excellent tutorial on doing just that:
https://www.natashatherobot.com/ios-autolayout-scrollview/
I am trying to add collection view to UIView and there is a problem that doesn't make any sense. Screenshot. I made the background color of the collection view, to make show the view area more clearly.
If I add the collection view straight to the controller (just like in UICollectionViewController), the top padding doesn't exist.
In this example, I have autolayouted the collection view to resize to the whole view but the problem existed the moment I added collection view to the UIView.
Also, if I add another collection view right after this view, there items start from the top, without any margins.
If there is anything else you need me to provide, I will do it. I think this is a storyboard bug or something because there are no insets, in the view's attributes.
I am trying to recreate a UIView I have seen in multiple apps, mainly Shazam. The top half of the screen has some interactive buttons, and the bottom half looks like a tableView with custom cells. When the bottom half is panned/swiped up, the tableView scrolls over the top half with velocity, much like a scroll view.
I have been researching this and experimenting for a couple days now. I have gotten close, but not quite there.
My last approach was a view that had a tableView inside it. When the view was panned, the view would move to wherever the finger moved it to, but then would not have any velocity afterwards. Also when the tableView was panned/swiped down, it wouldn't move the whole view down.
Before that I tried a scrollView that took up the whole length of the screen. That gave the desired effect, but the button wasn’t tappable, and you could scroll the view in the button area, which is undesired.
Does it utilize ScrollViews or is it using a tableView that acts much like a ScrollView somehow.
Here is the Shazam UI/UX I am looking to recreate:
The top portion has interactive buttons, and doesn’t scroll. The bottom half shows content and when scrolled, covers up the top portion.
Below is what I have tried so far: This one is the panning view, which sort of works, but doesn’t have velocity and the tableView doesn’t scroll the view back down.
Any thoughts on a direction I can take from here is greatly appreciated. I am using Swift.
Cheers
This sort of thing is perhaps best done with a collection view and a custom layout — you can have some items for which you set layout attributes absolute to the view, and others relative to the scroll content offset.
There's a great (if wandering) discussion of this and other techniques in the Advanced User Interfaces with Collection Views talk from WWDC 2014.
This is actually simple than it seems at first. Here's how you can achieve this:
Create a UIViewController (not a UITableViewController).
Add some buttons to the top area of the screen.
Add a table view spanning the entire view controller's view. Make sure the table view is on top of the buttons added in the previous step.
Configure the top cell of the table view to be transparent (by setting its background color to Clear). Set the background color on the table view to Clear as well. This way it won't obscure the elements at the top of the screen, unless the table is scrolled up.
Because your table view is now transparent, you'll need to explicitly set the background color on the table cells other than the top one.
Profit!
I'm having a hard time finding the best way to structure this design.
The top view has a minimum height and becomes sticky when it reaches this height. The bottom view hosts a paging controller with three views within. Each of these views hosts either a collection view or table view with vertical scrolling.
I'm really at a loss on how to approach this. Is the entire view scrollable and I should prevent scrolling on the second view until the top view has reached it's sticky height? Or are each of these views separate uitableviews and the pagingcontroller is just one cell? Should I even be using a pagingcontroller or should I use a scrollview with paging enabled? (the latter was a little rough interaction-wise)
Thank you!
Take a look at the Advanced User Interfaces using Collection View from WWDC this year. This view is very very very similar to the iTunes Connect app interface. The entire session video explains how they created that interface.
I used a similar method to this to create the keyboard in the Emojicate app.
I think what I'd do is actually fake the sticky header. So something like this...
Use only one collection view.
Create a "segmented data source" that contains three data sources. (See the video from WWDC about this)
When the segmented control is changed then update the collection view by changing its layout and (if you want) dataSource.
Make the entire top section a header on the collection view.
When the collection view scrolls past a certain point (when you want to sticky the header) then have a second view that is the compressed header and make it visible at the top of the screen. This is not attached to the collection view at all.
When the segmented control changes you can update the collection view by changing the "selected datasource". The datasource can also contain a UICollectionViewLayout that will update it.
Essentially, the tableview you are talking about is just a collection view where the cell width is equal to the screen width. i.e. fake a table view.
The sticky header isn't sticky at all. Just when it starts to go off screen you can put a fake header there instead.
It will require a duplicate (ish) view and some thinking about how to structure the data but I think this will be easier and less resource hungry than having multiple collection views and page controller and stuff.
If you want me to go through it in more detail let me know but it's a complex subject. Watch the video first.
I would make this part a navigation bar. Should be relatively easy. Just have to customize the back button with a barButtonItem and do a couple of labels in the titleView.
I would make the next part a Table View.
The tableView has 2 sections. The first section doesn't have a section header and the second section doesn't have any cells but just a section header.
First and only cell in this section:
And the rest would be the second section header's view:
This gives you the stickiness that you want because the section header will remain there even if you scroll past it and since the collection has only 2 sections the controls will always remain on top.
I think the collection/table paging part is the hardest part and I don't know clearly how it can be done. But I was thinking it could perhaps be a ContainerView. Each view of the container view would be either a tableview or a collectionview. You would have to add some code to handle the movement of the containerview relative to the second section header (possibly an autolayout constraint that attaches the containerview to the buttom of the first tableview that you implemented above).
I don't think having your tables/collections in a scrollview would be a good implementation. I think I have even read in documentation that developers should stay away from that (but I might be remembering it incorrectly).
I would have:
A "header view" with three subviews:
Fixed height top and bottom views (they stay visible at any size).
A middle view that appears/disappears as the superview grows/shrinks.
A scroll view (table or collection view are subclasses) on that partially covers the header view with a top inset set enough to reveal the underlying header view (the same way pull to refresh views are revealed).
The paging buttons could be set as table/collection view section header views.
Finally track the scroll view's scroll position to keep manually adjusting the header view height.
Another way to see this solution.
Two completely separated parts, a header view and a table view.
A simple header view (blue) that adjusts its subviews as its height changes. More precisely hides its middle subview (light blue) when it shrinks.
A table view that a) partially covers the header view in Interface builder but b) has a top inset as to avoid hiding the header view in the actual device (tableView.contentInset = UIEdgeInsetsMake(60.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f);).
The two parts are only "connected" by resizing the header view height as the table view scrolls up/down.