Question

I am trying to create a resize toggle animation on this simple custom TUIScrollView class (from TwUI open source project and very similar to UIScrollView) that I have built. It is called TUILayout and supports horizontal layout as well as vertical, animated insertions and removals and has a more declarative way of supplying data to it’s cells that I prefer over delegation. It recycles views similar to TUITableView or UITableView. Anyway if you want to follow along, it’s just one class and is here.

https://github.com/mrjjwright/TUILayout.

In the example code, the user clicks the blue button in the lower left and all the rows shrink smoothly to a size where the user can reorder and delete some rows (right click on a row in the example to see this in action), etc… and then the user toggle the rows back out to their original size by clicking the blue button again.

While doing this resize in setObjectHeight:animated I first resize my model objects that represent the rows, recalculate and set the contentSize on the TUIScrollView, cycle in all the new views (say 10 more views will fit in the shrunk view so dequeueReusableView and addSubview gets called 10 times) and finally I animate the frames of all the views to their size and location in layoutSubviews.

The result is that the scrollview correctly shrinks to a size where the scrollbar no longer displays, the views that are on screen animate smoothly down to their reduced size, but the newly added subviews that can now fit in the visibleRect animate in much later as one block of subviews.

So all the newly added subviews lag behind the views that were on the screen and I can’t figure out why the animation isn’t all happening together. I have tried lots of different combos of things with no luck including CATransactions. I am wondering if it has to with how a CAScrollLayer works or if somebody can help me think through this.

The more general issue is how to smoothly handle resizing animations on scrollviews that recycles their views and I have looked at several other grids out there in the iOS world and have got some inspiration but am looking for more.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think I might have solved my own issue here (as I was making my bed this morning it hit me). I forced the current runloop to run after cycling in all the necessary subviews and very importantly not setting the contentSize of the scrollview until after the run loop completes and adds the needed subviews for the animation. In order to get the run loop to fire I used the trick from this SO question:

 skipLayout = YES;
 [[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] runMode: NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate: [NSDate date]];
 skipLayout = NO;

If skipLayout is set TUILayout just returns from layoutSubviews so that the views just added are not immediately removed by the recycling layout code. Forcing the run loop to run made sure that all subviews were on the screen for the animation. After this I performed the resize animated layout. I updated the code on github if anybody is interested. I will leave this question open for a while to gain some further insight.