Autolayout Constraints on empty UIView do not work as expected - ios

Question

So I have setup a UIView that contains a UIScrollView (and child content view) that has sub views that are series of UILabels and UIViews that grow and shrink depending on the content contained in them, all using AutoLayout from the Storyboard. This works when I have something like Label - Label - Label - View w/o any issues, however if I put an empty UIView in-between two labels and insert sub views on the UIView, I'm not seeing the results I'm expecting. I have the following layout in a storyboard:
...where the teal and blue views are labels that grow to infinite height and the orange view (optionsPanel) is an empty UIVIew that I later inject sub views into. The rest of the stuff on the window is UILabels and UISegment controls. Between each row of views I have a Vertical Space constraint with a constant of 8. This all worked beautifully until I had to put in the empty UIView and programmatically inject sub views. The code I would expect to work would be something like (optionsPanel is the orange colored UIView)...
optionsPanel.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = YES;
NSArray *options = [product objectForKey:#"options"];
lastTop = 10;
for(int i=0;i<options.count; i++) {
NSDictionary *option = [options objectAtIndex:i];
NSArray *values = [option objectForKey:#"values"];
if([self hasNoneValue:values] && values.count == 2) {
NSDictionary *value = [self notNoneValue:values];
M13Checkbox *optionCheck = [[M13Checkbox alloc] initWithTitle:[option objectForKey:#"name"]];
optionCheck.frame = CGRectMake(0, lastTop, 280, 25);
[optionsPanel addSubview:optionCheck];
lastTop += 25;
} else {}
}
...where the orange UIView would magically grow and everything would just get pushed around accordingly, however this is what I'm seeing:
...the orange UIView does not grow at all, and the other two top UIView have gone somewhere off the screen. So my next guess was to turn off the Autoresizing Mask using...
optionsPanel.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = NO;
...but I'm getting a result where everything appears to be working but the orange UIView (optionsPanel) has no height for whatever reason and looks like:
This is getting closer to what I would expect, so I thought I would force the height of the orange UIView using code like...
frame = optionsPanel.frame;
frame.size.height = lastTop;
optionsPanel.frame = frame;
...but this appears to have no affect on anything.
Purely guessing, I found that this code almost works, if I arbitrary set the optionPanel's origin to something much larger than the space that is needed....
optionsPanel.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = YES;
NSArray *options = [product objectForKey:#"options"];
lastTop = 10;
for(int i=0;i<options.count; i++) {
NSDictionary *option = [options objectAtIndex:i];
NSArray *values = [option objectForKey:#"values"];
if([self hasNoneValue:values] && values.count == 2) {
NSDictionary *value = [self notNoneValue:values];
M13Checkbox *optionCheck = [[M13Checkbox alloc] initWithTitle:[option objectForKey:#"name"]];
optionCheck.frame = CGRectMake(0, lastTop, 280, 25);
[optionsPanel addSubview:optionCheck];
lastTop += 25;
} else {}
}
lastTop += 10;
frame = optionsPanel.frame;
frame.size.height = lastTop;
frame.origin.y += 300; //some arbitrarily‎ large number
optionsPanel.frame = frame;
..which gives this result:
...but apparently the AutoLayout has decided that the name label needs to take up the extra space. Its an ugly approach but if I could figure out how much space I need then I could just push everything down, if I had to. What's the secret to having a dynamic UIView between two dynamically sized labels and everything just work???

Answer 1

As #Timothy says, you need to manually add constraints to the subviews of the orange view if you want it to resize based on its contents—views don’t do this by default.
In general, if you’re using autolayout in a window, you should never be manually setting the frame of any view. Autolayout overrides any frames you set the every time it’s called, so even if you manage to manually get it working for a second it’ll fail the next time anything triggers a layout.

Answer 2

For views created in code, it's perfectly fine to set their frames as long as their translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints property is YES (the default, by the way).
However, for a view instantiated in storyboard or a nib, you can not set its translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints to YES.