Question

I want to draw text into UIView‘s subview using drawInRect:withFont:lineBreakMode call but that operates on the current context only.

Is it possible to draw text into a subview from current view?

The subview is a generic UIView instance and I don’t really want to create a new UIView-derived class just for this purpose if I can avoid it.

Answer 1

One option would be to add a CALayer to the view’s layer instead of adding a UIView to the view. The CALayer has a delegate property which you can assign any object to. The CALayer calls:

- (void)drawLayer:(CALayer *)layer inContext:(CGContextRef)ctx

on the delegate, which you can take to do something like:

- (void)drawLayer:(CALayer *)layer inContext:(CGContextRef)ctx {
    if (layer == myLayer) {
        UIGraphicsPushContext(ctx);
        [string drawInRect:rect withFont:font lineBreakMode:mode];
        UIGraphicsPopContext();
    }
}