Manual positioning of titleLabel in a custom UIButton (using layoutSubviews)

Question

hi all,

i've create a UIButton subclass for my app and i need to manually reposition the titleLabel to be about 1/4 of the button's height. this post; http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=763140 appears to directly address the same issue, and the solution is simple and perfectly understandable. however, i have failed to implement this because my override of layoutSubviews is never called. my button is static, so layoutSubviews only need be called the first time, but it never is. my code:

@interface MyButton : UIButton {}

@implementation MyButton

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame
{
  self = [[UIButton buttonWithType:UIButtonTypeRoundedRect] retain];
  [[self layer] setCornerRadius:14.0f];
  [[self layer] setBorderWidth:3.0f];
  [[self layer] setMasksToBounds:YES];
  [self setBackgroundColor:[UIColor redColor]];
  [self setFrame:frame];
  return self;
}

- (void)layoutSubviews
{
  NSLog(@"layout subs\n");
  [super layoutSubviews];
}

@end

moving the label would be no problem, but layoutSubviews is never called. i've also tried adding layoutIfNeeded, but it made no difference. what's even weirder, is i've tried to call [self layoutSubviews] directly from the constructor but layoutSubviews is still not called!. i'm starting to think this might even be a bug in SDK 3.1.3

can anyone help?!

Answer 1

to answer my own question, it seems i was subclassing incorrectly. taking the following approach results in layoutSubviews being called correctly:

+ (id)buttonWithFrame:(CGRect)frame {
  return [[[self alloc] initWithFrame:frame] autorelease];
}

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame {
  if (self = [super initWithFrame:frame]) 
  {
    ...
    [self setFrame:frame];
  }
  return self;
}

hope that helps others