In this post, I’ll explain how to add a border, rounded corners, and drop shadow to any
UIView using some simple
CALayerproperties. I’m not a
CALayer guru, but these few tricks from the layer world are particularly nice to know about.
These properties are present for every
UIView, since every view is actually drawn using an underlying
CALayer object owned by the UIView. You can do a lot without even knowing about
CALayers because
UIViews encapsulate a lot of their functionality. These properties, however, are useful pieces that are not
available directly through the UIView interface.
To use these properties, you need to include the QuartzCore header:
#import
Borders
To get a border, just set the
borderColor and
borderWidth properties of the layer, for example:
label.layer.borderColor = [UIColor blueColor].CGColor;
label.layer.borderWidth = 1;
The borderColor is a
CGColorRef, which you can easily extract from any
UIColor as in the above example, which generates a border like this:
The border is just inside the frame of the view. Fractional values are allowed for the
borderWidth as well.
Corners
You can create rounded corners with code like this:
label.layer.cornerRadius = 20;
label.layer.borderColor = [UIColor grayColor].CGColor;
label.layer.borderWidth = 3;
just the cornerRadius property is needed; I’ve also set the border to show how these properties work together:
As you can see in the example screenshot, the
backgroundColor of the
UIView is also restricted by the corner radius. You need to have
clipsToBounds set to
YES
on your UIView for rounded corners to work.
Shadows
You can also create a drop shadow that will be based on the alpha component of whatever is drawn in your view. Often this will result in a shadow just around the edges of the view. This example
code on a UILabel:
label.layer.shadowColor = [UIColor blackColor].CGColor;
label.layer.shadowOpacity = 1.0;
label.layer.shadowRadius = 5.0;
label.layer.shadowOffset = CGSizeMake(0,
3);
label.clipsToBounds = NO;
results in this appearance:
In this case, you need
clipsToBounds to be
NO
in order for a shadow outside the frame of your view to show up. Next I’ll show you how you can actually combine rounded corners and drop shadows, since I’m sure that’s what you really want to do now.
All together
Let’s say you want to present an image with a border, rounded corners, and a drop shadow. The obvious problem from the above explanations is that
clipsToBounds needs to be
YES
for the rounded corners to work and NO
for the drop shadows. What’s a coder to do?
We can get around this apparent paradox by using the fact that the
CALayer treats its own background color (which may be image-based) differently than the
UIView‘s background color. Specifically, we can set
clipsToBounds to
NO
and still achieve rounded corners by using direct properties of the layer instead of the
UIView. This code:
UIView *imgView = [[[UIView
alloc] initWithFrame:imgFrame]
autorelease];
imgView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:@"mandel.png"];
imgView.layer.backgroundColor = [UIColor colorWithPatternImage:image].CGColor;// Rounded corners.
imgView.layer.cornerRadius = 10;// A thin border.
imgView.layer.borderColor = [UIColor blackColor].CGColor;
imgView.layer.borderWidth = 0.3;// Drop shadow.
imgView.layer.shadowColor = [UIColor blackColor].CGColor;
imgView.layer.shadowOpacity = 1.0;
imgView.layer.shadowRadius = 7.0;
imgView.layer.shadowOffset = CGSizeMake(0,
4);
Generates the image on the right, using the left image as the source (mandel.png):
Reference
I originally learned about this stuff from
this blog post.