Ios – Programmatically accessing subviews of UIView added in Interface Builder

I had a similar question, but wasn't satisfied with the answer (or any I could find on the net), so I tried it in practice and here is what I got:

• init does not cause layoutSubviews to be called (duh)
• addSubview: causes layoutSubviews to be called on the view being added, the view it’s being added to (target view), and all the subviews of the target
• view setFrame intelligently calls layoutSubviews on the view having its frame set only if the size parameter of the frame is different
• scrolling a UIScrollView causes layoutSubviews to be called on the scrollView, and its superview
• rotating a device only calls layoutSubview on the parent view (the responding viewControllers primary view)
• Resizing a view will call layoutSubviews on its superview (Important: views with an intrinsic content size will re-size if the content that determines their size changes; for example, updating the text on a UILabel will cause the intrinsic content size to be updated and thus call layoutSubviews on its superview)

My results - http://blog.logichigh.com/2011/03/16/when-does-layoutsubviews-get-called/

There is also an easier way to access the view instead of dealing with the nib as an array.

1) Create a custom View subclass with any outlets that you want to have access to later. --MyView

2) in the UIViewController that you want to load and handle the nib, create an IBOutlet property that will hold the loaded nib's view, for instance

in MyViewController (a UIViewController subclass)

  @property (nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet UIView *myViewFromNib;

(dont forget to synthesize it and release it in your .m file)

3) open your nib (we'll call it 'myViewNib.xib') in IB, set you file's Owner to MyViewController

4) now connect your file's Owner outlet myViewFromNib to the main view in the nib.

5) Now in MyViewController, write the following line:

[[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@"myViewNib" owner:self options:nil];

Now as soon as you do that, calling your property "self.myViewFromNib" will give you access to the view from your nib!