How to make UICollectionViewCells with content lined up across cells

Question

I have a UICollectionView that is using flow layout and it is horizontally scrolling. In each cell, I have five subviews (labels and image views). I have an array of model objects, one object per cell, that contains the data to be displayed in each subview in each cell.

Some items can have more content than others (some labels will have more text), but I want all the cells to be the same height. I also want it so that the top of each subview is lined up with the tops of the same subview in the other cells. And if all model objects have a nil value for one of the fields, then the subviews for that field should be left out of each cell.

For example, I have the following image where it shows three cells and the subviews in each cell. For this example, all of the cells have data for subview 1, so it shows up in all of them. But only the first two cells have data for subview 2, so it only shows up in those cell. Likewise, subview 3 only shows up in the first cell because that is the only cell that has data for that subview. Now for subview 4, none of the cells have data for it, so it is completely skipped and there is no space taken up in any cell to render it. Instead, subview 5 is rendered in the place where subview 4 would normally have been rendered and it is only in the third cell because only that cell had data for it.

I also have dashed lines between the subviews showing that they are supposed to be lined up across cells.

Question

So I am just curious what the best way to do something like this is, given these requirements. Could this be done with AutoLayout or do I need to manually layout these subviews?

The only way I can think of doing this currently is to iterate through all of the model objects, try to figure out how tall each subview is and essentially keep track of the tallest height for each subview. And if no cell has data for a particular subview, the height of that one would be zero.

Next, I would turn those heights into computed offsets for each subview, where the computed offset would be the sum of the heights of the subviews above it and the spacing between each subview.

Then, I would try to lay these out manually, I suppose, with the frame of each subview being set to some width (not sure how to calculate the optimal width of each subview) and a vertical position equal to the computed offset of that subview. Or I guess I could do AutoLayout as well where the top constraint on a field is equal to the computed offset for each subview, but is that less efficient?

And then I guess the height of each cell would be just the computed offset of the last item plus its height plus the spacing to the bottom of the cell. So then I would take the max height of all the cells and set all of the cells to the same height.

But I was just curious if there was a better way of doing this or if there was anything that I was overlooking that could simplify things. I would also like this to be as efficient as possible as the collection view could have up to 100 items in it.

Answer 1

You will need to loop through your data, calculating the "max height" for each item.

I'd suggest putting your 5 "views" in a vertical stack view.

As you loop through your data, get the max height for each of the 5 views. Then, when you set your data in each cell, set the height constraint on each of the 5 views (or, set a view hidden if it is nil in all data items).

Then set your collection view's height to the necessary height to fit all the views plus spacing.