UIButton doesn't listen to content mode setting?

Question

firstButton is a UIButton of type Custom. I'm programmatically putting three of them across each cell of a table, thusly:

[firstButton setImage:markImage forState:UIControlStateNormal];
[firstButton setContentMode:UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit];
[cell.contentView addSubview:firstButton];

Elsewhere, I'm telling it to clipToBounds. What I get is a crop of the center square of the image, rather than an aspect-scaled rendering of it. I've tried this lots of ways, including setting the mode property on firstButton.imageView, which also doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

Instead of setImage try setBackgroundImage

Answer 2

The answer is to use a UIImageView with all the lovely Content Mode settings you want, and then layer a custom button on top of it. Dumb that you can't do that all in one shot, but it appears that you can't.

Answer 3

I had the same problem. I see this question is a little old, but I want to provide a clear and correct answer to save other folks (like me) some time when it pops up in their search results.

It took me a bit of searching and experimenting, but I found the solution. Simply set the ContentMode of the "hidden" ImageView that is inside the UIButton.

[[firstButton imageView] setContentMode: UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit];
[firstButton setImage:[UIImage imageNamed:imageName] forState:UIControlStateNormal];

Perhaps that's what Dan Ray was eluding too in his accepted answer, but I suspect not.

Answer 4

After a couple of hours of confusion, here's how I got it to work under iOS 3.2. As dusker mentioned, using setBackgroundImage instead of setImage did the job for me.

CGRect myButtonFrame = CGRectMake(0, 0, 250, 250);
UIImage *myButtonImage = [UIImage imageNamed:@"buttonImage"];

UIButton *myButton = [UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeCustom];

[myButton setBackgroundImage:myButtonImage forState:UIControlStateNormal];
[myButton setFrame: myButtonFrame];
[myButton setContentMode: UIViewContentModeScaleAspectFit];

Answer 5

I also advice to have a look at the adjustsImageWhenHighlighted UIButton property to avoid weird deformations of the image, when the button is pressed.