IOS Prevent text from stacking on screen rotation - ios

I have a custom table view cell with two labels in it. If I rotate the screen the two labels stack on top of each other and behave badly. If I back out and display the view again while still in landscape mode they appear correctly.
I have figured out how to prevent this between a label and a textfield or a webview by pinning them with horizontal spacing, but that doesn't seem to be possible with two labels. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

You may need to intercept the viewcontroller rotation delegate callbacks and handle them how you want by manually positioning labels on the screen.

I think all views should be re-positioned again in viewWillLaypitSubviews or viewDidLaypitSubviews methods. Otherwise, the resizing decision is put to iOS. If you don't want a resize, you can try playing with the autoResizingmask and autoResizeSubviews properties of the table view cell.

Related

Custom Page Control with Paging Scrollview

Instead of the standard dots that Apple provides for a page control, I want to have something like this. However I don't want it to be in an infinite loop were you can circle around. All I care about is the scrollable text on top, not the parallax image.
Currently I have a paging scrollview that contains three view controllers so my custom page control will have only three words: Main, Today, Settings.
The way I see this being built is the following:
Subclass UIView and insert three UIButton's and evenly space them. The title of the buttons will be Main, Today, Settings.
Insert this UIView as child of scrollview (or maybe not)
Make UIView the width of the iPhone screen
Not sure about here now -> as you scroll the scrollview shift the UIView on and off the screen so that the UIButton will be centered in one of the view controllers in the scrollview.
Am I on right track or does anyone have a demo to this?
Yes. You are on right track. You can use scrollView for this exact purpose. You have to make use of scrollViewDelegate methods for this. The below link will explain you how to do that.
How to make Paging with scrollView.

UITableViewCell background spanning multiple cells

This is end end result I want:
And this is the thing I tried initially.
This does not work, the cells below/above the cell with the background will overlap or underlap the background depending on when they are added into the tableview (like via dequeue/scrolling).
I am quite OK with this not working, and I believe I can achieve it by other means. For example by adding these backgrounds as views within the tableview itself and moving them based on the content offset or similar ways, maybe adding a background image that is tall with them embedded.
But. I am curious if there are some easier way, just adding the view into the XIB and applying a rotation would be very nice.
The background should be below the text in the other cells as well - this is where the complications comes in.
Anyway. Is this possible in some super-neat way?
What you should do is setting all cell's background to clear, and to set a background to your UITableView or your UIView.
Or, as you suggest, you can add a UIView with a rotation applied, and add it as a subview of your UIView/UITableView, and send it to back with [self.view sendSubviewToBack:backgroundView].

hide/ show controls in View controllers

My application gathers input from users and hence it is full of Labels, text boxes and buttons and I have to show or hide set of labels and text boxes based on certain conditions.
To accomplish it, I did the following.
Set fixed height (lets say 30) for all the controls
Set height constraint on each of the controls and created an outlet to the height constraint in the ViewController
Alter the heightConstraint.constant value programatically (between 0.0 and 30.0) based on the scenarios.
Having programmed like this, it is very difficult for me if there is any change in layout. (i.e., if user requested to add/remove any particular control from the view Controller).
I am using Auto Layout constraints. Could anyone suggest if there is a better way to accomplish my goal.
I am using IOS9 and Swift.
Many thanks in advance.
You can use UITableViewController with static cells for this case.
For hide/show row or section, you can change the size in the tableView:heightForRowAtIndexPath method.
UITableViewController automatically manages the layout and with static cell you can even create outlet for all the controls.
Have you considered using a table for this? It has mechanisms for inserting and deleting rows and would manage the layouting for you - only part you'd need to care about are the contents of the cells.
Instead of making IBOutlets to the height constraints of all the views that you might need to hide, you can just use the hidden property of UIViews to hide/show the view.
In case you need the view to make space for other views, you could set a simple animation and move the view out of screen bounds. You might face issues with layout constraints but it's surely worth the effort from a UI/UX perspective.
Additionally, if you know that you don't need a view any more you can even remove the view from it's superview.

How can I dynamically add/remove a button in a UIView and reposition the buttons below it and vertically resize the view?

I have a UIView, defined in a nib, and I need to be able to show/hide a middle button in that view. When I show the button, I need to reposition the two bottom buttons below it, as well as make the view taller to make room for everything. When I hide the middle button, I need to move the two bottom buttons up and vertically resize the view to make it less tall. I do NOT need to animate any of this since it the changes will never occur while the view is visible to the user.
I'm new to iOS and I'm used to using Autolayout, but I can't use Autolayout in this case to handle this automatically, so my current approach is to hardcode the frame position and dimensions for the two bottom buttons for each of the two different situations. I'm also hardcoding the two different frame sizes for the view itself. In viewDidLoad, I determine if I need to show/hide the middle button and set the frames for the view and bottom buttons appropriately. This works, but if feels hacky. Is there a better way I should be doing this?
Thanks in advance for your wisdom!
You don't need to hardcode your frame sizes in viewDidLoad. The only thing you should take care of is determining that whether you need to show you middle button or not. Within the implementation file where you are allocating your UIButtons, check if the middle button has to be shown, if Yes allocate it, if not then don't. The frames of two buttons and the view should contain a factor which can set/size them accordingly.
You'd basically be managing the Auto-layout programmatically. And if you're not even allowed to that then whatever else you'd end up doing would pretty much be a hack.

What is the purpose of UIView's autoresizingMask?

After reading about UIView's autoresizingMask on SO and developer.apple.com I'm still unclear what the purpose is. What's a situation where setting this property is necessary?
Yes, it is often necessary to set it if you don't want to resize the views manually. Note that it is mostly useful for subviews (i.e. those views that don't take the whole screen) rather then the main view of your app.
Views typically may need resizing if:
the device is rotated
an extra view (say, an ad) is added to the view, so the existing subviews have less available space.
For example, suppose if you have a view with two buttons on it, one in the top-left corner, another in the top-right corner. In order for the buttons to get wider when the view transitions from portrait to landscape, you need to set the FlexibleLeftMargin to the right button, FlexibleRightMargin to the left button.
Edit: autoresizingMask is also the first thing to look at if you see weird holes or overlaps when device is rotated or a new subview is added. Quite often the proper setting of these masks for subviews can get you a nice looking view in both orientations without having to lay out subviews manually - but usually it takes some experimenting.
Edit2: (since this is still gathering upvotes) Autoresizing masks are now mostly superseded with "Auto Layout", which allows for much more flexible constraints on views' sizes and positions. That being said, translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints is still occasionally useful for dynamically added views.
The purpose is that UIView properly shifts and resizes when its superview changes due to resizing, orientation change, showing editing controls in tableview cells etc.

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