iOS7's subview trimmed if out of parent view bounds

iOS7's subview trimmed if out of parent view bounds

bringSubviewToFront problem?

1.

I've rumbled through new UI info from apple - didn't help.

Now let the code and the screenshots show you the problem i've ran into. To ensure that is not my buggy code, i've created a new project, with a single file - a UIViewController that has a tableView inside id. the delegates are set.

I do the following:

    - (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView
{

    // Return the number of sections.
    return 3;
}

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{

    return 3;
}

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"UITableViewCell";
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    if (cell == nil) {
        cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    }
    cell.textLabel.text = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d",indexPath.row];
    // Configure the cell...

    UIView * redView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, -10, 100, 20)];
    redView.backgroundColor = [UIColor redColor];
    [cell addSubview:redView];

    return cell;
}

The table view is set on Grouped. Lets run it on iOS 6: 

Solution:

It's because iOS 7 introduced some changes to the view hierarchy of UITableViewCells.

It used to be UITableViewCell view -> contentView.

Now it's more like UITableViewCell view -> scrollView -> contentView.

The solution is to set clipsToBounds = NO on the scrollView (which is set to YES by default). And the way to achieve that is through the superview property.

So basically in iOS6 and prior, to allow content to spill out of the cell bounds, you would do:

self.clipsToBounds = NO;                        //cell's view
self.contentView.clipsToBounds = NO;            //contentView

In iOS7 you have to also prevent the scrollview from not clipping so you'd do something like:

self.clipsToBounds = NO;                        //cell's view
self.contentView.clipsToBounds = NO;            //contentView
self.contentView.superview.clipsToBounds = NO;  //scrollView

And the backwards compatible solution I use is:

self.clipsToBounds = NO;
self.contentView.clipsToBounds = NO;
if ([self.contentView.superview isKindOfClass:[NSClassFromString(@"UITableViewCellScrollView") class]]) self.contentView.superview.clipsToBounds = NO;

Keep in mind this is Hacky™ and if the view hierarchy changes again in iOS 8, you might be in trouble. Unfortunately it seems Apple doesn't want us to spill content out of UITableViewCells so AFAIK this is the only workable solution.

2.

The -[UIView bringSubviewToFront:] method only works for direct children, not grandchildren. Remember that the view hierarchy is a tree, and normally a view only knows about its "parent" (or superview) and its direct "children" (or subviews). You would need to do something like this:

// First, get the view embedding the grandchildview to front.
[self bringSubviewToFront:[grandchildview superview]];
// Now, inside that container view, get the "grandchildview" to front. 
[[grandchildview superview] bringSubviewToFront:grandchildview];