Add a border outside of a UIView (instead of inside)

Question

If a add a border of a view using code in a view like

self.layer.borderColor = [UIColor yellowColor].CGColor;
self.layer.borderWidth = 2.0f;

the border is added inside the view like the following:

the right view is the original view, as you can see, the black area of bordered view is less than the original one. but what I want to get is a border outside of original view, like this:. the black area is equal to original one, how can I implement it?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there isn't simply a little property you can set to align the border to the outside. It draws aligned to the inside because the UIViews default drawing operations draw within its bounds.

The simplest solution that comes to mind would be to expand the UIView by the size of the border width when applying the border:

CGFloat borderWidth = 2.0f;

self.frame = CGRectInset(self.frame, -borderWidth, -borderWidth);
self.layer.borderColor = [UIColor yellowColor].CGColor;
self.layer.borderWidth = borderWidth;