UICollectionView cell subviews do not resize

Question

In a CollectionView, some cells should have an additional subview or layer. The CollectionView can be told to resize it's cells, thus all content needs to resize appropriately.

Currently, the cell is initialized from a nib containing a cell with imageview; the cell nib is linked to a custom UICollectionViewCell subclass, that only does the init. Autoresize subviews is checked.

The CollectionView is told to resize the cell by a value derived and returned in sizeForItemAtIndexPath:. I have subclassed a FlowLayout but it only specifies ScrollDirection and Insets.

All of that is working fine. Problem: How do I add subview/layer to the cell so it also resizes correctly? I tried adding subviews and layers with translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints off, but these do not automatically change size at all. Also tried to use code frame/view instead of nib.

The best I got now is a cell.contentView.layer sublayer which I add in cellForItemAtIndexPath:; that is "manually" resized by storing the cell's frame.size from sizeForItemAtIndexPath:, which is not only ugly but also ends up with the sublayer having various sizes for different cells.

Any help appreciated!

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue just now.

When using the UICollectionViewFlowLayoutDelegate method to set the cell size depending on device and device-orientation, the size would be calculated properly but subviews would not resize to fill the newly size cell. The effect was a large blank cell with small subviews that don't fill the cell's bounds / remain the size equal to their current value in the xib file.

I solved this by doing the following in awakeFromNib:

- (void)awakeFromNib
{
    [super awakeFromNib];

    self.contentView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth;
    self.contentView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = YES;
}

Prior to doing this, the contentView mask was nil.