Is it possible to "bake" all subviews to an views bitmap?

Question

I have an view which has got a lot of background subviews, which will never change. To save memory, I want to draw these directly to the view's bitmap. There's some complex code involved already in positioning, rotating and scaling these subviews in their superview.

Is there -for example- a way to tell an layer of an view to render into some context of another view? I assume that this approach would get the same visual result as adding a subview.

For example, CALayer has got -drawInContext:, but how can I use that to print the subviews of the view to itself? (I want to get rid of those subviews as soon as I printed them to the superview)

Answer 1

question is already answered several times. see for example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2425002/easy-or-efficient-way-to-copy-the-bitmap-representation-from-one-view-to-another/2425382#2425382