How could I clone/duplicate some sort of UIView for iOS?

Question

(screenshot below helps explain what I am trying to do)

The idea behind this is that I have a UIView, with various different UI elements inside, for example, let's say I have a UIView, and inside there we have a UILabel.

Now I'm wanting to duplicate the UIView (with the label inside) BUT somehow after that I need to perhaps make a change to the label, e.g. change the text property.

The reason I need something like this is so I can structure the UIView with everything I need in it looking nice, but to actually have different data with different copies of it.

I'm not certain this is the best approach, but it's the only one I could come up with. If anyone has any ideas on how to do this, or any ideas on a better approach I'd really appreciate it. A lot!

Answer 1

I personally think the best answer is to create each view separately and configure it as needed. You can make a method that just configures new UIViews to look the same, and pass each view through it.

However, if you really need to copy a UIView, you can archive it, and then unarchive it:

id copyOfView = 
[NSKeyedUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:[NSKeyedArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:originalView]];
UIView *myView = (UIView *)copyOfView;
[self.view addSubview:myView];

If you have a bunch of these, make sure you're using the Instruments time profiler to check your drawing efficiency.

Answer 2

This is a very natural and useful thing to do. What you're looking for is a container view controller. Put your reusable "cell" into its own view controller and its own nib file. Then, in your parent view controller, use addChildViewController: to add as many of these as you'd like and configure each of them. They can each have their own IBOutlets that you can use to modify the contents.

This is very similar to the pattern used by UITableView and UITableViewCell (it doesn't use "child view controllers" specifically, but it does use this pattern).

For full details, see "Creating Custom Container View Controllers" in the View Controller Programming Guide for iOS.

Note that Storyboard includes a "Container View" as an option in the object templates to make this even easier.

If you want lower-level access, you can also do this by hand using UINib to load the nib file and wire its outlets (and this is how we used to do it before iOS 5), but today I would use child view controllers.