Getting the visible rect of an UIScrollView's content

Question

How can I go about finding out the rect (CGRect) of the content of a displayed view that is actually visible on screen.

myScrollView.bounds

The code above works when there's no zooming, but as soon as you allow zooming, it breaks at zoom scales other than 1.

To clarify, I want a CGRect that contains the visible area of the scroll view's content, relative to the content. (ie. if it's a zoom scale 2, the rect's size will be half of the scroll view's size, if it's at zoom scale 0.5, it'll be double.)

Answer 1

I don't think that a UIScrollView gives you that rectangle directly, but I think you have all the necessary items to calculate it.

A combination of the bounds, the contentOffset and the zoomScale should be all you need to create the rectangle you are looking for.

Answer 2

You have to compute it using UIScrollView's contentOffset and contentSize properties, like so:

CGRect visibleRect;
visibleRect.origin = scrollView.contentOffset;
visibleRect.size = scrollView.contentSize;

You can then log it for sanity-testing:

NSLog( @"Visible rect: %@", NSStringFromCGRect(visibleRect) );

To account for zooming (if this isn't already done by the contentSize property) you would need to divide each coordinate by the zoomScale, or for better performance you would multiply by 1.0 / zoomScale:

CGFloat scale = (CGFloat) 1.0 / scrollView.zoomScale;
if ( isless(scale, 1.0) )      // you need to #include <math.h> for isless()
{
    visibleRect.origin.x *= scale;
    visibleRect.origin.y *= scale;
    visibleRect.size.width *= scale;
    visibleRect.size.height *= scale;
}

Aside: I use isless(), isgreater(), isequal() etc. from math.h because these will (presumably) do the right thing regarding 'unordered' floating-point comparison results and other weird & wonderful architecture-specific FP cases.

Answer 3

Answering my own question, mostly thanks to Jim Dovey's answer, which didn't quite do the trick, but gave me the base for my answer:

CGRect visibleRect;
visibleRect.origin = scrollView.contentOffset;
visibleRect.size = scrollView.bounds.size;

float theScale = 1.0 / scale;
visibleRect.origin.x *= theScale;
visibleRect.origin.y *= theScale;
visibleRect.size.width *= theScale;
visibleRect.size.height *= theScale;

The main difference is that the size of the visibleRect ought to be scrollView.bounds.size, rather than scrollView.contentSize which is the size of the content view. Also simplified the math a bit, and didn't quite see the use for the isless() which would break the code whenever it's greater.