Building a titleView programmatically with constraints (or generally constructing a view with constraints)

Question

I\'m trying to build a titleView with constraints that looks like this:

I know how I would do

Answer 1

Thanks @Valentin Shergin and @tubtub! According to their answers I made an implementation of navigation bar title with dropdown arrow image in Swift 1.2:

1. Create a UIView subclass for custom titleView
2. In your subclass: a) Use auto layout for subviews but not for itself. Set translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints to false for subviews and true for titleView itself. b) Implement sizeThatFits(size: CGSize)
3. If your title can change call titleLabel.sizeToFit() and self.setNeedsUpdateConstraints() inside titleView's subclass after text changes
4. In your ViewController call custom updateTitleView() and make sure to call titleView.sizeToFit() and navigationBar.setNeedsLayout() in there

Here's minimal implementation of DropdownTitleView:

import UIKit

class DropdownTitleView: UIView {

    private var titleLabel: UILabel
    private var arrowImageView: UIImageView

    // MARK: - Life cycle

    override init (frame: CGRect) {

        self.titleLabel = UILabel(frame: CGRectZero)
        self.titleLabel.setTranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints(false)

        self.arrowImageView = UIImageView(image: UIImage(named: "dropdown-arrow")!)
        self.arrowImageView.setTranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints(false)

        super.init(frame: frame)

        self.setTranslatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints(true)
        self.addSubviews()
    }

    convenience init () {
        self.init(frame: CGRectZero)
    }

    required init(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
        fatalError("DropdownTitleView does not support NSCoding")
    }

    private func addSubviews() {
        addSubview(titleLabel)
        addSubview(arrowImageView)
    }

    // MARK: - Methods

    func setTitle(title: String) {
        titleLabel.text = title
        titleLabel.sizeToFit()
        setNeedsUpdateConstraints()
    }

    // MARK: - Layout

    override func updateConstraints() {
        removeConstraints(self.constraints())

        let viewsDictionary = ["titleLabel": titleLabel, "arrowImageView": arrowImageView]
        var constraints: [AnyObject] = []

        constraints.extend(NSLayoutConstraint.constraintsWithVisualFormat("H:|[titleLabel]-8-[arrowImageView]|", options: .AlignAllBaseline, metrics: nil, views: viewsDictionary))
        constraints.extend(NSLayoutConstraint.constraintsWithVisualFormat("V:|[titleLabel]|", options: NSLayoutFormatOptions(0), metrics: nil, views: viewsDictionary))

        self.addConstraints(constraints)

        super.updateConstraints()
    }

    override func sizeThatFits(size: CGSize) -> CGSize {
        // +8.0 - distance between image and text
        let width = CGRectGetWidth(arrowImageView.bounds) + CGRectGetWidth(titleLabel.bounds) + 8.0
        let height = max(CGRectGetHeight(arrowImageView.bounds), CGRectGetHeight(titleLabel.bounds))
        return CGSizeMake(width, height)
    }
}

and ViewController:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    // Set custom title view to show arrow image along with title
    self.navigationItem.titleView = dropdownTitleView

    // your code ...
}

private func updateTitleView(title: String) {
    // update text
    dropdownTitleView.setTitle(title)

    // layout title view
    dropdownTitleView.sizeToFit()
    self.navigationController?.navigationBar.setNeedsLayout()
}