Getting the screen location of a cell from a UICollectionView

Question

This isn't so much a question as an explanation of how to solve this problem.

The first thing to realize is that the UICollectionView does inherit from a UIScrollView - so doing a standard lookup with a scroll view's content is the best solution.

Here's the problem I was addressing:

I had a UICollectionView that had differing items in each cell - along with differing types of cells. I need the selection of a cell to cause an effect of the image in the cell to appear to expand and take over the whole screen. How I did the expansion is for another post.

The challenge was getting the cell's position on the screen so that the animating section would have a reference point from where to start.

So, to facilitate getting this information - consider the following code:

First note:

UICollectionView *picturesCollectionView;
DrawingCell cell; // -> instanceof UICollectionViewCell with custom items.

// first, get the list of cells that are visible on the screen - you must do this every time
// since the items can change...  This is a CRITICAL fact.  You do not go through the
// entire list of cells - only those the collectionView indicates are visible.  Note 
// there are some things to watch out for - the visibles array does not match the indexPath.item
// number - they are independent.  The latter is the item number overall the cells, while
// the visibles array may have only 2 entries - so there is NOT a 1-to-1 mapping - keep
// that in mind.

NSArray *visibles = [self.picturesCollectionView visibleCells];

// now, cycle through the times and find the one that matches some criteria.  In my
// case, check that the cell for the indexPath passed matches the cell's imageView...
// The indexPath was passed in for the method call - note that the indexPath will point
// to the number in your datasource for the particular item - this is crucial.

for (int i=0; i<visibles.count; i++) {
    DrawingCell *cell = (DrawingCell *)visibles[i];
    if (cell.imageView.image == (UIImage *)images[indexPath.item]) {

        // at this point, we've found the correct cell - now do the translation to determine
        // what is it's location on the current screen...  You do this by getting the contentOffset
        // from the collectionView subtracted from the cell's origin - and adding in (in my case)
        // the frame offset for the position of the item I wish to animate (in my case the
        // imageView contained within my custom collection cell...

        CGFloat relativeX = cell.frame.origin.x - self.picturesCollectionView.contentOffset.x + cell.imageView.frame.origin.x;
        CGFloat relativeY = cell.frame.origin.y - self.picturesCollectionView.contentOffset.y + cell.imageView.frame.origin.y;

        // I now have the exact screen coordinates of the imageView - so since I need this
        // to perform animations, I save it off in a CGRect - in my case, I set the size
        // exactly to the size of the imageView - so say you were doing a Flicker display
        // where you wanted to grow a selected image, you get the coordinates of the image
        // in the cell and the size from the displayed image...

        UIImageView *image = cell.imageView;

        // selectedCell is a CGRect that's global for the sake of this code...

        selectedCell = cell.frame;
        selectedCell.origin.x = relativeX;
        selectedCell.origin.y = relativeY;
        selectedCell.size.width = cell.imageView.frame.size.width;
        selectedCell.size.height = cell.imageView.frame.size.height;
    }
}

// done.  I have my coordinates and the size of the imageView I wish to animate and grow...

Hopefully, this helps other folks that are trying to figure out how to say overlay something on the cell in an exact position, etc...

Answer 1

-(void)collectionView:(UICollectionView *)cv didSelectItemAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath;
{

UICollectionViewLayoutAttributes *attributes = [cv layoutAttributesForItemAtIndexPath:indexPath];

CGRect cellRect = attributes.frame;

CGRect cellFrameInSuperview = [cv convertRect:cellRect toView:[cv superview]];

NSLog(@"%f",cellFrameInSuperview.origin.x);
}

It work for me.You can try yourself