How to disable animation for code nested in a UIView animation block?

Question

There's a method which is called inside an animation block by a third party API. In that method I'm supposed to build some subviews. But in this case I don't want animation to happen when constructing the subviews.

Is there a way of saying "[UIView dontAnimateFromHere] ... [UIView nowYouMayAnimateAgain]"?

Answer 1

Yes indeed, there is such a way. It's like this:

[UIView setAnimationsEnabled:NO];
// Animations happen here
[UIView setAnimationsEnabled:YES];

...this will disable both UIView animations triggered via blocks and animations triggered using the old begin/end methods.

That said, I'm assuming your third party library is pre-compiled otherwise you could modify the source directly: it is of course possible it's doing something weird and animating in another way, so your mileage may vary with this solution.

This won't disable the changes being made in the animation blocks: they'll simple happen immediately. Otherwise you'd risk bad things happening since your third party API would be making assumptions about where views might be that weren't true.