iOS - Using storyboard and autolayout to center the UIScrollView - ios

I'm creating iOS app using story board and auto layout so that it will work good on both iPhone4 and iPhone5. Below is the screen shot of the view that I'm creating using story board.
In the above image, I want to keep the scroll view in the middle from leading edge of superview and the right table view. I dont want the scroll view to increase its width in iPhone5. I tried different combinations of constraints, but I couldn't achieve it.
Can some suggest me what are all constraints that I've to set for scroll view so that it will be in center.

How to Center a View on the Storyboard
This answer has been updated for Xcode 8.
This answer is for people who are just doing a general search for how to center things using a storyboard and don't understand constraints.
I assume you are using a Storyboard (not XIB files) and Auto Layout. This is the default nowadays so if you don't know what that means then don't worry about it. If you want to check, though, you can click Main.storyboard in the Project Navigator and then the File inspector. You can make sure that Use Auto Layout is checked:
Select your button (or whatever view you want to center) on the storyboard. Then click the align button on the bottom right. Select "Horizontally in Container" and "Vertically in Container". Click "Add 2 Constraints".
If it wasn't perfectly centered already you may need to do one more thing. Click the "Update Frames" button that is two to the left of the align button. Your view should now be centered on the storyboard.
And more importantly, now when you run your app it should be centered no matter what device size you are using.
I originally learned this from Creating the user interface – Auto layout. The basic idea is still the same, but the UI arrangement has changed a little in Xcode now.
See also
How to set constraints programmatically

You will need to do this by adding an additional view to the screen.
At the moment you have...
- UIView (main view)
|
| - scrollView
| - tableView
You should put the scroll view inside another view like this...
- UIView (main view)
|
| - UIView (spacer View)
| | - scrollView
|
| - tableView
Now what you can do is have these constraints...
spacer view leading edge constraint to super view = 0
spacer view trailing edge to table view leading edge = 0
table view width = (whatever the width is)
table view trailing edge to super view = 0
This will lay out the spacer view and the table view so that the spacer view will grow.
Now you need to add...
scroll view width = x
scroll view height = y
scroll view centered vertically in super view
scroll view centered horizontally in super view.
Now, because the scroll view's super view is the spacer view then it will always be centered in between the table view and the rest of the space.

Related

Autolayout with UIScrollView

I am using autolayout in Xcode and am creating a fairly tall (1300px) ViewController with a uiscrollview to navigate up and down. I made the viewcontroller freeform so its dimensions are [375,1300]. I then incorporated the scrollview, added the content view as well as all the subviews & constrained everything, leaving no constraint errors. At runtime there are no errors, but everything is all smushed into the normal screen size when I intended for it to be very tall (~1300px) and scrollable. Any clue as to what I am doing wrong?
Below is a diagram showing the issue where:
The Outer Black Blox is the ViewController's view
The Inner Black Boxes are subviews
and The Blue Box is what is displayed on the screen
Yes, your correct #Ryan Cocuzzo. I think you need to set sub view priority from 1000 to 250. See below screen shots.
1) Select height constraint of the subview
2)Then go to show to size inspector
3) Now change the priority constraint from 1000 to 250.
4)Finally you get like this
Make sure the following are true:
The 4 content views are subviews of the UIScrollView, not your view controller.
The autolayout constraints on the 4 content views must reference the UIScrollView only, not the view controller's view.
The 4th box cannot have a bottom constraint.
It looks like the 4th box has a constraint to make it's bottom align with the bottom of the view controller's view. This would force the other views to smush up together. The 4th box also cannot have a bottom constraint so that the scrollview can resize itself to encompass it's subviews.

How to make ScrollView width = to device screen width?

I am making an app that has a (child) View inside a Scroll View. I understand I have to explicitly set the child View's width since the Scroll View won't provide that information to the child, but how can I make this child View's width auto-adjust based on the width of the device?
For example, in the below I've set the width to 380 which centers the "Quotes" in iPhone 6, but makes them slightly right of center in iPhone 5.
You can use auto layout to set the width of your subView equal to your main View by performing a control drag from your subView to your main View like this:
Then select "Equal Widths" from the popup
Select viewController
Stretch the view you want full screen size to the size of the screen
Click the central icon from the three choices along the bottom of the window
You will an icon pop up
The top 4 values will have a dotted red line joining them
click them all
at the bottom of the pop up you will see 'add 4 constraints'
click this
Done!
You can delete the constraint for width. The view will place it self horizontally becuase of the leading and trailing space to superview. No need for a specific width.
I think your scrollview will be scrolling vertically so in that case you probably need to provide a constraint for the height or your view, and update scrollview contentsize accordingly to this.
Since your child view is located in the view hierarchy of your view controller's view you can assign constraints between your child view and your view controller's view.
Ctrl drag from your child view to your view controller's view. You will see option to set them to have equal widths. Select it. Then adjust the constant if you want the width of your child view to be lower.
You can then add leading and trailing constraints between your child view and your scroll view.
Doing it in this way will also ensure that you set the content width of you scroll view dynamically and correctly.
Let me know if it works for you

iOS autolayout to center my view between two views

How to set up autolayout in Interface Builder to arrange views vertically as shown on image:
Top view pinned to top screen edge, Bottom view pinned to bottom screen edge. My view should be centered between top and bottom views (so distance to Top view equals to distance to Bottom view)
The way to do this is to have 2 invisible "spacer" views between you visible views.
You can't make spaces have equal height. But you use the "spacer" views and place them between your views (with 0 gap to the surrounding views).
Then you give these views equal heights and they will push your views around to centre the My View with equal gap to the Bottom View and Top View.
i.e. like this...
V:|[Top View][spacer1][My View][spacer2(==spacer1)][Bottom View]|
EDIT - Another way
I just thought of another way of doing this. You could have an invisible container UIView that is between Top View and Bottom View with no gap.
Then you place My View inside this invisible view and centre it vertically.
One more solution is to add an invisible view between top view and botom view and place my view in center of this view:
(5 years later) I've found the most canonical solution:
UILayoutGuide is specially introduced to solve this kind of tasks (since iOS 9).
Use layout guides to replace the dummy views you may have created to represent inter-view spaces or encapsulation in your user interface - Ref docs
It works pretty fine in code, but unfortunately Interface Builder doesn't support custom layout guides.

Centering View between neighbors using autolayout in IOS

I am attempting to layout a screen design using constraints (auto-layout) from interface builder and hope to avoid coding constraints, but I would accept an answer for either case I guess.
I have two subviews in a contained in a top level view. I want to fix vertical distance of the first subview to the top of the screen (I was able to accomplish that - common use case for a vertical space constraint). I want the second subview to float (vertically) in the center of the distance between the bottom of first subview and the bottom of the screen. The idea is that the design responds somewhat to iPhone 3.5" vs 4" dimensions.
I am having trouble defining a constraint or set of constraints that would accomplish this.
I have tried setting inequalities on the vertical spacing constraints between the second subview and the top of it's neighbor (the first subview) and the bottom of the superview, and playing with the priorities of those constraints.
An idea that was suggested in a few other related posts on SO is to use a container that is pinned to the bottom of the screen, as well as the pinned to the bottom edge of the first subview, and then center my second subview in the container. I was hoping to avoid complicating the view hierarchy if possible, but maybe that isn't easily avoided.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
UPDATE
This answer describes how to do this in Xcode 6.0 (and probably works in Xcode 5.0 and 5.1).
ORIGINAL
If you want to do this with auto layout, you have to add at least one spacer view. It doesn't have to be the superview of the vertically-centered view (or any other view), so it has a pretty minor effect on your view hierarchy.
I recommend not trying to set up constraints in Interface Builder in Xcode 4.6.3. It's just too painful. But if you really must, this is doable.
Create a spacer (a plain old UIView) from the bottom edge of the top-hugging view to the bottom edge of superview. Set it to hidden. Give it constraints to the top-hugging view and the left and bottom edges of the root view, and pin its width. My spacer width is 10:
Add your middle view (here, a button). Give it a “Horizontal Center in Container” constraint. Then select both the middle view and the spacer view and give them a “Vertical Centers” constraint:
Note that if you drop the middle view when IB is showing the correct guidelines, it will set these constraints for you.
You can test by enabling resizing for descendents (but not siblings & ancestors) and resizing the root view in IB. The middle view will remain centered between the top-hugging view and the bottom of the superview:

How to use UIScrollView in Storyboard

I have a scroll view with content that is 1000px tall and would like to be able to lay it out for easy design on the storyboard.
I know it can be done programmatically but I really want to be able to see it visually. Every time I put a scroll view on a view controller it won't scroll. Is it possible to get it to work like I want or do I have to do it in the code?
I'm answering my own question because I just spent 2 hours to find the solution and StackOverflow allows this QA style.
Start to finish here is how to make it work in storyboard.
1: go to you view controller and click on Attribute Inspector.
2: change Size to Freeform instead of Inferred.
3: Go to the main view on that storyboard, not your scrollview but rather the top level view.
4: Click Size Inspector and set this view to your desired size. I changed my height to 1000.
Now you will see that you storyboard has your view setup so you can see the entire height of your scroll for easy design.
5: Drop on a scrollview and stretch it so it takes up the whole view. You should now have a scrollview with size of 320,1000 sitting on a view in your view controller.
Now we need to make it scroll and need to make it show content correctly.
6: Click on your scrollview and click on Identity Inspector.
7: Add a User Defined runtime attribute with KeyPath of contentSize then type of SIZE and put in your content size. For me it is (320, 1000).
Since we want to see our whole scroll view on the storyboard we stretched it and it has a frame of 320,1000 but in order for this to work in our app we need to change the frame down to what the visible scrollview will be.
8: Add a runtime attribute with KeyPath frame with Type RECT and 0,0,320,416.
Now when we run our app we will have a visible scrollview has a frame of 0,0,320, 416 and can scroll down to 1000. We are able to layout our subviews and images and whatnot in Storyboard just the way we want them to appear. Then our runtime attributes make sure to display it properly. All of this without 1 line of code.
Here are the steps with Auto Layout that worked for me on XCode 8.2.1.
Select Size Inspector of View Controller, and change Simulated Size to Freeform with height 1000 instead of Fixed.
Rename the view of View Controller as RootView.
Drag a Scroll View as subview of RootView and rename it as ScrollView.
Add constraints for ScrollView:
ScrollView[Top, Bottom, Leading, Trailing] = RootView[Top, Bottom, Leading, Trailing]
Drag a Vertical Stack View as subview of ScrollView and rename it as ContentView.
Add constraints for ContentView:
ContentView.height = 1000
ContentView[Top, Bottom, Leading, Trailing, Width] = ScrollView[Top, Bottom, Leading, Trailing, Width]
Select Attributes Inspector of ContentView, and change Distribution to Fill Equally instead of Fill.
Drag a View as subview of ContentView and rename it as RedView.
Set Red as the background of RedView.
Drag a View as subview of ContentView and rename it as BlueView.
Set Blue as the background of BlueView.
Select RootView, and click Update Frames button.
Update Frames is a new button in Xcode8, instead of Resolve Auto Layout Issues button. It looks like a refresh button, located in the control bar below the Storyboard:
View hierarchy:
RootView
ScrollView
ContentView
RedView
BlueView
View Controller Scene (Height: 1000):
Run on iPhone7 (Height: 1334 / 2):
Here are the steps that worked for me on iOS 7 and XCode 5.
Drag a ViewController (it comes with UIView "View").
1.1 Select "View Controller" and select "File Inspector" and uncheck "Auto layout".
Drag a ScrollView (as child of ViewController's UIView "View")
Select ScrollView and open "Identity Inspector".
Enter "contentSize" for keyPath. Select "Size" for Type. And Enter {320, 1000} for value.
Note: Step 4 is simply saying that the scroller contains some content whose size is 320x1000 units. So setting contentSize will make scroller work.
Select View Controller, Select "Attributes Inspector" then select Freeform from Size.
Note: step 5 will allow us to change the size of "View" that the view controller comes with.
Select "View" and then select "Size Inspector".
Set Width to 320 and height to 1000.
Note: 5, 6 & 7 is purely for us to see stretched or entire expanded view inside StoryBoard.
Note: Make sure to unselect "Auto Layout" on View Controller.
Your View hierarchy should look like:
After hours of trial and error, I've found a very easy way to put contents into scrollviews that are 'offscreen'. Tested with XCode 5 & iOS 7. You can do this almost entirely in Storyboard, using 2 small tricks/workarounds :
Drag a viewcontroller onto your storyboard.
Drag a scrollView on this viewController, for the demo you can leave its size default,
covering the entire screen.
Now comes trick 1 : before adding any element to the scrollView, drag in a regular 'view' (This view will be made larger than the screen, and will contain all the sub elements like buttons, labels, ...let's call it the 'enclosing view').
Let this enclosing view's Y size in the size inspector to for example 800.
Drop in a label onto the enclosing view, somewhere at Y position 200, name it 'label 1'.
Trick 2 : make sure the enclosing view is selected (not the scrollView !), and set its Y position to for example -250, so you can add an item that is 'outside' the screen
Drop in a label, somewhere at the bottom of the screen, name it 'label 2'. This label is actually 'off screen'.
Reset the Y position of the enclosing view to 0, you'll no longer see label 2, as it was positioned off screen.
So far for the storyboard work, now you need to add a single line of code to the viewController's 'viewDidLoad' method to set the scrollViews contents so it contains the entire 'enclosing view'. I didn't find a way to do this in Storyboard:
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
self.scrollView.contentSize = CGSizeMake(320, 800);
}
You can try doing this by adding a contentSize keyPath as a size to the scrollView in the Identity Inspector and setting it to (320, 1000).
I think Apple should make this easier in storyboard, in a TableViewController you can just scroll offscreen in Storyboard (just add 20 cells, and you'll see you can simply scroll), this should be possible with a ScrollViewController too.
Getting Scrolling to work in iOS7 and Auto-layout in iOS 7 and XCode 5.
In addition to this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22489795/1553014
Apparently, all we need to do is:
Set all constraints to Scroll View (i.e. fix scroll view first)
Then set distance-from-scrollView constraint to the bottom most item to scroll view (which is the super view).
Note: Step 2 will tell storyboard where the last piece of content lies within Scroll view.
For this example, I have unchecked the Autolayout feature of the Interface builder. And, I'm still using (for no reason at all) the relatively old 4.6.1 version of Xcode.
Start with a view controller that has a scroll view over it (the main view).
1: Add a Container View, from the Object Library, to the scroll view. Notice that a new view controller is added to the storyboard and it is linked to the view controller with the scroll view.
2: Select the container view and, on the Size Inspector, make it anchor to top and left without auto resizing.
3: Change its height to 1000. (1000 is used for this example. You should apply the value that you require.)
4: Select the new view controller and, from the Attributes Inspector, change Size to Freeform.
5: Select the view of the new view controller and, on the size Inspector, change the height to 1000 (which is equal to the container view's height).
6: For your test later, while still on the view of the new view controller, add a label at the top and at the bottom of the view.
7: Select the scroll view from the original view controller. On the Identity inspector, add an attribute with the keyPath set to contentSize, type set to Size, and value set to {320, 1000} (or your container view's size).
8: Run on the 4-inch iPhone Simulator. You should be able to scroll from the top label up to the bottom label.
9: Run on the 3.5-inch iPhone Simulator. You should be able to scroll from the top label up to the bottom label.
Remember that Xcode 4.6.1 can only build for iOS6 and below. Using this approach and building for iOS6, I am still able to achieve the same results when the app is run on iOS7.
Note that within a UITableView, you can actually scroll the tableview by selecting a cell or an element in it and scrolling up or down with your trackpad.
For a UIScrollView, I like Alex's suggestion, but I would recommend temporarily changing the view controller to freeform, increasing the root view's height, building your UI (steps 1-5), and then changing it back to the standard inferred size when you are done so that you don't have to hard code content sizes in as runtime attributes. If you do that you are opening yourself up to a lot of maintenance issues trying to support both 3.5" and 4" devices, as well as the possibility of increased screen resolutions in the future.
Disclaimer :- Only for ios 9 and above (Stack View).
If you are deploying your app on ios 9 devices use a stack view.
Here are the steps :-
Add a scroll view with constraints - pin to left, right, bottom, top (without margins) to superview (view)
Add a stack view with same constraints to scroll view.
Stack View Other Constraints :- stackView.bottom = view.bottom and stackView.width = scrollView.width
Start adding your views. The scroll view will decide to scroll based on the size of the stack view (which is essentially your content view)
Here's how to setup a scrollview using Xcode 11
1 - Add scrollview and set top,bottom,leading and trailing constraints
2 - Add a Content View to the scrollview, drag a connection to the Content Layout Guide and select Leading, Top, Bottom and Trailing. Make sure to set its' values to 0 or the constants you want.
3 - Drag from the Content View to the Frame Layout Guide and select Equal Widths
4 - Set a height constraint constant to the Content View
i wanna put my 5 cents to accepted answer:
i've been researching topic for 2 days and finally found a solution that i will be using always from now on
go up to item 4 in accepted answer and forget about adding attributes of frames and contentsizes and so on
to make everything automatic just use solution from this link
everything is clear, easy, elegant and works like a charm on ios 7. i'm pretty glad with all that lol
You should only set the contentSize property on the viewDidAppear, like this sample:
- (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated{
[super viewDidAppear:animated];
self.scrollView.contentSize=CGSizeMake(306,400.0);
}
It solve the autolayout problems, and works fine on iOS7.
Here is a simple solution.
Set the size attribute of your view controller in the storyboard to "Freeform" and set the size you want. Make sure it's big enough to fit the full content of your scroll view.
Add your scroll view and set the constraints as you normally would. i.e. if you wants the scroll view to be the size of your view, then attach your top, bottom, leading, trailing margins to the superview as you normally would.
Now just make sure there are constraints in the subviews of the scrollview that connect the top and bottom of the scroll view. Same for left and right if you have horizontal scrolling.
In iOS7 I found that if I had a View inside a UIScrollView on a FreeForm-sized ViewController it would not scroll in the app, no matter what I did. I played around and found the following seemed to work, which uses no FreeForms:
Insert a UIScrollView inside the main View of a ViewController
Set the Autolayout constraints on the ScrollView as appropriate. For me I used 0 to Top
Layout guide and 0 to Bottom layout Guide
Inside the ScrollView, place a Container View. Set its height to whatever you want (e.g. 1000)
Add a Height constraint (1000) to the Container so it doesn't resize. The bottom will be past the end of the form.
Add the line [self.scrollView setContentSize:CGSizeMake(320, 1000)]; to the ViewController that contains the scrollView (which you've hooked up as a IBOutlet)
The ViewController (automatically added) that is associated with the Container will have the desired height (1000) in Interface Builder and will also scroll properly in the original view controller. You can now use the container's ViewController to layout your controls.
Here's a bit of a grubby answer that get's to the same solution for vertical scroll views, but (against the ethos of stackoverflow) doesn't answer the question. Instead of using a scrollView, just use a UITableView, drag a normal UIView into the header, and make it as big as you want, you can now scroll the content in storyboard.
Apparently you don't need to specify height at all! Which is great if it changes for some reason (you resize components or change font sizes).
I just followed this tutorial and everything worked: http://natashatherobot.com/ios-autolayout-scrollview/
(Side note: There is no need to implement viewDidLayoutSubviews unless you want to center the view, so the list of steps is even shorter).
Hope that helps!
The key is the contentSize.
This is often missing and not indicated when adding a UIScrollView.
Select the UIScrollView and select the Identity Inspector.
Add a contentSize keyPath as a size to the scrollView in the Identity Inspector and setting it to (320, 1000).
Scroll away.
If you are using auto-layout than best approach is to use UITableViewController with static cells in storyboard.
I have also once faced the problem with a view that require much more scrolling so change the UIScrollView with above mentioned technique.

Resources