Why might Autolayout constraints not appear at runtime?

Question

I am trying to create a custom subclass of UITableViewCell that displays an image and a few labels to the right of the image. I have my UIImageView and UILabels arranged in stack views, the outermost of which I pinned to all four sides of the content view.

But when I run the app in the simulator, I do not see the image views. Debugging the view hierarchy, I see they are getting clipped.

And digging in a little further by focusing on the outermost stack view with "Show Constraints" on, I don't see my auto layout constraints at all (instead I get an ambiguous position runtime warning for each of the outermost stack views).

The text label that expands to the right is set up with 0 lines and the table view gets a constant estimatedRowHeight value and its rowHeight set to UITableViewAutomaticDimension, so I think if these constraints were working, the rows in the table would size to fit the content. Perhaps notably, any width or height auto layout constraint I add does appear when I debug the view hierarchy, so I know some constraints are present at runtime, I just cannot for the life of me figure out why the constraints relative to the content view are not.

Answer 1

After wrestling with this for a long time and having a much more experienced developer look over my project, it seems as if there was nothing wrong with the way it was set up. Recreating the table view cell from scratch with exactly the same layout and constraints and using the exact same code fixed this issue. I had messed around with the stack views and constraints quite a bit before this started happening, so it might be possible to get Xcode into a place where it does not properly set up constraints when you run the app in the simulator.

Answer 2

Try to solve all warnings which are printed into your console log when you run your application and viewing this screen. Because you can not ignore warnings always, many warnings you must have to remove by correcting or solving issues in your constraint. And that is the only solution which helps you most of the time.