How do I reset after a UIScrollView zoom?

Question

I have a Graph being drawn inside a UIScrollView. It's one large UIView using a custom subclass of CATiledLayer as its layer.

When I zoom in and out of the UIScrollView, I want the graph to resize dynamically like it does when I return the graph from viewForZoomingInScrollView. However, the Graph redraws itself at the new zoom level, and I want to reset the transform scale to 1x1 so that the next time the user zooms, the transform starts from the current view. If I reset the transform to Identity in scrollViewDidEndZooming, it works in the simulator, but throws an EXC_BAD_ACCSES on the device.

This doesn't even solve the issue entirely on the simulator either, because the next time the user zooms, the transform resets itself to whatever zoom level it was at, and so it looks like, if I was zoomed to 2x, for example, it's suddenly at 4x. When I finish the zoom, it ends up at the correct scale, but the actual act of zooming looks bad.

So first: how do I allow the graph to redraw itself at the standard scale of 1x1 after zooming, and how do I have a smooth zoom throughout?

Edit: New findings The error seems to be "[CALayer retainCount]: message sent to deallocated instance"

I'm never deallocating any layers myself. Before, I wasn't even deleting any views or anything. This error was being thrown on zoom and also on rotate. If I delete the object before rotation and re-add it afterward, it doesn't throw the exception. This is not an option for zooming.

Answer 1

I can't help you with the crashing, other than tell you to check and make sure you aren't unintentionally autoreleasing a view or layer somewhere within your code. I've seen the simulator handle the timing of autoreleases differently than on the device (most often when threads are involved).

The view scaling is an issue with UIScrollView I've run into, though. During a pinch-zooming event, UIScrollView will take the view you specified in the viewForZoomingInScrollView: delegate method and apply a transform to it. This transform provides a smooth scaling of the view without having to redraw it each frame. At the end of the zoom operation, your delegate method scrollViewDidEndZooming:withView:atScale: will be called and give you a chance to do a more high-quality rendering of your view at the new scale factor. Generally, it's suggested that you reset the transform on your view to be CGAffineTransformIdentity and then have your view manually redraw itself at the new size scale.

However, this causes a problem because UIScrollView doesn't appear to monitor the content view transform, so on the next zoom operation it sets the transform of the content view to whatever the overall scale factor is. Since you've manually redrawn your view at the last scale factor, it compounds the scaling, which is what you're seeing.

As a workaround, I use a UIView subclass for my content view with the following methods defined:

- (void)setTransformWithoutScaling:(CGAffineTransform)newTransform;
{
    [super setTransform:newTransform];
}

- (void)setTransform:(CGAffineTransform)newValue;
{
    [super setTransform:CGAffineTransformScale(newValue, 1.0f / previousScale, 1.0f / previousScale)];
}

where previousScale is a float instance variable of the view. I then implement the zooming delegate method as follows:

- (void)scrollViewDidEndZooming:(UIScrollView *)scrollView withView:(UIView *)view atScale:(float)scale;
{
    [contentView setTransformWithoutScaling:CGAffineTransformIdentity];
// Code to manually redraw view at new scale here
    contentView.previousScale = scale;
    scrollView.contentSize = contentView.frame.size;
}

By doing this, the transforms sent to the content view are adjusted based on the scale at which the view was last redrawn. When the pinch-zooming is done, the transform is reset to a scale of 1.0 by bypassing the adjustment in the normal setTransform: method. This seems to provide the correct scaling behavior while letting you draw a crisp view at the completion of a zoom.

UPDATE (7/23/2010): iPhone OS 3.2 and above have changed the behavior of scroll views in regards to zooming. Now, a UIScrollView will respect the identity transform you apply to a content view and only provide the relative scale factor in -scrollViewDidEndZooming:withView:atScale:. Therefore, the above code for a UIView subclass is only necessary for devices running iPhone OS versions older than 3.2.

Answer 2

I have a detailed discussion of how (and why) UIScrollView zooming works at github.com/andreyvit/ScrollingMadness/.

(The link also contains a description of how to programmatically zoom UIScrollView, how to emulate Photo Library-style paging+zooming+scrolling, an example project and ZoomScrollView class that encapsulates some of the zooming magic.)

Quote:

UIScrollView does not have a notion of a “current zoom level”, because each subview it contains may have its own current zoom level. Note that there is no field in UIScrollView to keep the current zoom level. However we know that someone stores that zoom level, because if you pinch-zoom a subview, then reset its transform to CGAffineTransformIdentity, and then pinch again, you will notice that the previous zoom level of the subview has been restored.

Indeed, if you look at the disassembly, it is UIView that stores its own zoom level (inside UIGestureInfo object pointed to by the _gestureInfo field). It also has a set of nice undocumented methods like zoomScale and setZoomScale:animated:. (Mind you, it also has a bunch of rotation-related methods, maybe we're getting rotation gesture support some day soon.)

However, if we create a new UIView just for zooming and add our real zoomable view as its child, we will always start with zoom level 1.0. My implementation of programmatic zooming is based on this trick.

Answer 3

In "github.com/andreyvit/ScrollingMadness/" the zooming and pinching properties are not working in iPhone OS 3.0

Answer 4

Note that the solution provided by Brad has one problem though: if you keep programmatically zooming in (let's say on double tap event) and let user manually (pinch-out) zoom out, after some time the difference between the true scale and the scale UIScrollView is tracking will grow too big, so the previousScale will at some point fall out of float's precision which will eventually result in an unpredictable behaviour