UITextView that expands to text using auto layout

Question

I have a view that is laid out completely using auto layout programmatically. I have a UITextView in the middle of the view with items above and below it. Everything works f

Answer 1

BTW, I built an expanding UITextView using a subclass and overriding intrinsic content size. I discovered a bug in UITextView that you might want to investigate in your own implementation. Here is the problem:

The expanding text view would grow down to accommodate the growing text if you type single letters at a time. But if you paste a bunch of text into it, it would not grow down but the text would scroll up and the text at the top was out of view.

The solution: Override setBounds: in your subclass. For some unknown reason, the pasting caused the bounds.origin.y value to be non-zee (33 in every case that I saw). So I overrode setBounds: to always set the bounds.origin.y to zero. Fixed the problem.

Answer 2

You can do it through storyboard, just disable "Scrolling Enabled":)

Answer 3

I've found it's not entirely uncommon in situations where you may still need isScrollEnabled set to true to allow a reasonable UI interaction. A simple case for this is when you want to allow an auto expanding text view but still limit it's maximum height to something reasonable in a UITableView.

Here's a subclass of UITextView I've come up with that allows auto expansion with auto layout but that you could still constrain to a maximum height and which will manage whether the view is scrollable depending on the height. By default the view will expand indefinitely if you have your constraints setup that way.

import UIKit

class FlexibleTextView: UITextView {
    // limit the height of expansion per intrinsicContentSize
    var maxHeight: CGFloat = 0.0
    private let placeholderTextView: UITextView = {
        let tv = UITextView()

        tv.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
        tv.backgroundColor = .clear
        tv.isScrollEnabled = false
        tv.textColor = .disabledTextColor
        tv.isUserInteractionEnabled = false
        return tv
    }()
    var placeholder: String? {
        get {
            return placeholderTextView.text
        }
        set {
            placeholderTextView.text = newValue
        }
    }

    override init(frame: CGRect, textContainer: NSTextContainer?) {
        super.init(frame: frame, textContainer: textContainer)
        isScrollEnabled = false
        autoresizingMask = [.flexibleWidth, .flexibleHeight]
        NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self, selector: #selector(UITextInputDelegate.textDidChange(_:)), name: Notification.Name.UITextViewTextDidChange, object: self)
        placeholderTextView.font = font
        addSubview(placeholderTextView)

        NSLayoutConstraint.activate([
            placeholderTextView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: leadingAnchor),
            placeholderTextView.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: trailingAnchor),
            placeholderTextView.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: topAnchor),
            placeholderTextView.bottomAnchor.constraint(equalTo: bottomAnchor),
        ])
    }

    required init?(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
        fatalError("init(coder:) has not been implemented")
    }

    override var text: String! {
        didSet {
            invalidateIntrinsicContentSize()
            placeholderTextView.isHidden = !text.isEmpty
        }
    }

    override var font: UIFont? {
        didSet {
            placeholderTextView.font = font
            invalidateIntrinsicContentSize()
        }
    }

    override var contentInset: UIEdgeInsets {
        didSet {
            placeholderTextView.contentInset = contentInset
        }
    }

    override var intrinsicContentSize: CGSize {
        var size = super.intrinsicContentSize

        if size.height == UIViewNoIntrinsicMetric {
            // force layout
            layoutManager.glyphRange(for: textContainer)
            size.height = layoutManager.usedRect(for: textContainer).height + textContainerInset.top + textContainerInset.bottom
        }

        if maxHeight > 0.0 && size.height > maxHeight {
            size.height = maxHeight

            if !isScrollEnabled {
                isScrollEnabled = true
            }
        } else if isScrollEnabled {
            isScrollEnabled = false
        }

        return size
    }

    @objc private func textDidChange(_ note: Notification) {
        // needed incase isScrollEnabled is set to true which stops automatically calling invalidateIntrinsicContentSize()
        invalidateIntrinsicContentSize()
        placeholderTextView.isHidden = !text.isEmpty
    }
}

As a bonus there's support for including placeholder text similar to UILabel.

Answer 4

Obj C:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>

@interface ViewController : UIViewController

@property (nonatomic) UITextView *textView;
@end



#import "ViewController.h"

@interface ViewController ()

@end

@implementation ViewController

@synthesize textView;

- (void)viewDidLoad{
    [super viewDidLoad];
    [self.view setBackgroundColor:[UIColor grayColor]];
    self.textView = [[UITextView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(30,10,250,20)];
    self.textView.delegate = self;
    [self.view addSubview:self.textView];
}

- (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning{
    [super didReceiveMemoryWarning];
}

- (void)textViewDidChange:(UITextView *)txtView{
    float height = txtView.contentSize.height;
    [UITextView beginAnimations:nil context:nil];
    [UITextView setAnimationDuration:0.5];

    CGRect frame = txtView.frame;
    frame.size.height = height + 10.0; //Give it some padding
    txtView.frame = frame;
    [UITextView commitAnimations];
}

@end

Answer 5

An important thing to note:

Since UITextView is a subclass of UIScrollView, it is subject to the automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets property of UIViewController.

If you are setting up the layout and the TextView is the the first subview in a UIViewControllers hierarchy, it will have its contentInsets modified if automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets is true sometimes causing unexpected behaviour in auto layout.

So if you're having problems with auto layout and text views, try setting automaticallyAdjustsScrollViewInsets = false on the view controller or moving the textView forward in the hierarchy.

Answer 6

The view containing UITextView will be assigned its size with setBounds by AutoLayout. So, this is what I did. The superview is initially set up all the other constraints as they should be, and in the end I put one special constraint for UITextView's height, and I saved it in an instance variable.

_descriptionHeightConstraint = [NSLayoutConstraint constraintWithItem:_descriptionTextView
                                 attribute:NSLayoutAttributeHeight 
                                 relatedBy:NSLayoutRelationEqual 
                                    toItem:nil 
                                 attribute:NSLayoutAttributeNotAnAttribute 
                                multiplier:0.f 
                                 constant:100];

[self addConstraint:_descriptionHeightConstraint];

In the setBounds method, I then changed the value of the constant.

-(void) setBounds:(CGRect)bounds
{
    [super setBounds:bounds];

    _descriptionTextView.frame = bounds;
    CGSize descriptionSize = _descriptionTextView.contentSize;

    [_descriptionHeightConstraint setConstant:descriptionSize.height];

    [self layoutIfNeeded];
}