Designing UICollectionView cells in nib with Interface Builder (without storyboard)

Question

I am trying to design a custom UICollectionViewCell prototype (in Xcode 5.0.2), however Interface Builder doesn't let me add a cell to my UICollectionView while designing a nib. I can set the number of items (cells) and Interface Builder creates and displays cells perfectly if I'm using storyboard, but I can't add a cell to my collection view in a nib. I've tried:

• Drag and dropping collection view cell into collection view manually from the object library. (fails: doesn't let me drop the cell anywhere in my view)
• Creating my collection view with cells in storyboard and copy-pasting the whole view into nib. (fails: collection view is copied but the cell is gone)
• Creating my collection view with cells in storyboard, opening the storyboard as source code, finding my collection view cells, copying the relevant XML, opening my nib as source code, pasting it inside my collection view in XML. (fails: unable to open the nib in Interface Builder, it gives errors. When I remove the cell from source code, it opens again. Do not try this if you don't know what you are doing.)

I've also seen several questions about the same issue:

• Is it possible to create prototype cells in Interface Builder without story boards?
• Custom Header in UICollectionView with Interface Builder without Storyboard
• Prototype Cells in a nib instead of a storyboard

They all point out to doing them programatically and/or using another nib for the cell. I know how to do them, but is there any way to design the collection view cell, inside a collection view inside the same view in a nib, just as in storyboard? Why doesn't Interface Builder let me do that in nib where it allows (and even encourages) perfectly using storyboard?

Answer 1

The simple answer is no, this cannot be done. Think of a storyboard as a collection of XIBs. A XIB simply defines the facets of a particular view so that it can be constructed at runtime.

Regarding collection views and their storyboard implementations, it's important to understand that a storyboard allows for nesting of viewcontrollers and defining collection views with their XIBs because that keeps the fundamental paradigm of storyboards coherent. Since a storyboard is the means of defining the "story" or scene of an application it is only natural that it allows for the declaration of the reusable views for use inside a collection view.

The same cannot be said for XIBs because the fundamental idea behind XIBs is in reusability. This will allow a collection view defined in a XIB to have any cells used with it as long as the controller registers these classes with the collection view. This way you get the benefit of reusability as another controller can use the same XIB and register different cells etc.

So I think it would be far more confusing to allow for the declaration of the supported cells of a collection view inside a XIB since that breaks the single responsibility principle(if it can be called that) that XIBs aspire to.

Your best solution would be to define a custom collection view subclass that registers the relevant cells on instantiation, and then use this class in your XIB.