Question

I’m pretty new to ios. And while writing my first app i’v encountered that autolayout is only for ios 6.0. And i’d wish to make my app for at least 5.0 ios.

Maybe anyone would know how to make this without autolayout.

I have label which has dynamic text, 1row or 2 rows or 3 rows depends on user settings. And below it i have uitextfield. With autolayout i have no headache as it does all the work, the textfield sits nicely below in 1 2 or 3 rows of text above (resizes, moves automatically).

So how should i do this without autolayout?

Answer 1

Without autolayout you have to handle this in code. The recommended way of doing this would be to subclass your container view (the view that contains your label and text filed) and override the layoutSubviews method. In there you set the frames of the view’s subviews manually, based on your desired criteria (e.g., the label text metrics).

EDIT: here’s a specific example of something that could be in the containverView layoutSubviews method (typed from the top of my head):

// Those could be IBOutlets, or obtained by inspecting self.subviews
UILabel *label = self.label;
UITextField *textField = self.textField;

// Determine the labelSize, we could limit the maxSize (especially the height) manually here
CGSize maxSize = self.bounds.size;
CGSize labelSize = [label.text sizeWithFont:label.font constrainedToSize:maxSize lineBreakMode:label.lineBreakMode];

// Set the computed label size
CGRect labelFrame = label.frame;
labelFrame.size = labelSize;
label.frame = labelFrame;

// Now move the textField just below the label (we could also add a vertical margin here if we want)
CGRect textFieldFrame = textField.frame;
textFieldFrame.origin.y = labelFrame.origin.y + labelFrame.size.height;
textField.frame = textFieldFrame;

This just makes sure the text field is always below the label. Depending on the constraints you had in place, you might need to add more code to make sure the UI lays out correctly.

You also need to make sure that [containverView setNeedsLayout] gets called when the label text changes.