iPhone -- Layout manager for UIViews?

Question

I'm not sure whether "layout manager" is the correct term, but i'm looking for a way to get UIViews to flow into thier parent view, like left-floated div's would in an HTML page. Is there an easy way to do this, either via the iPhone api's or something external?

Answer 1

I don't know of an API to do this. Core Animation on the Mac has some layout stuff but I think it was not included on the iPhone.

What you describe does not sound extremely difficult though. Open source it? :-)

Answer 2

There is nothing like this really build into the sdk, but it shouldn't be too hard to get the behavior you're after. Just call

NSArray *subs = [parentView subviews];

to get all of the subviews already present. Loop through them like this

CGRect leftMostViewsFrame = nil;
for(UIView *cur in subs){
  CGRect where = cur.frame;
  //find the left most frame for a given X coord
}

and place your new view next to it

newView.frame = CGRectMake(leftMostViewsFrame.origin.x + leftMostViewsFrame.size.width, 
[parentView addSubview:newView];

......

You can write it much more cleanly than that and there is a lot more checking and reasoning you need to do to get all the behavior of float, but that is the basic approach i would take. I don't know if there is a third party lib you could use or not.