How to size a UIStackView depending on its content?

Question

I would like to have a similar behavior than the <Table> HTML tag, in the sense where the frame is sized according to its content.

In my very context, I use an UIStackView as the content view of a UITableViewCell. As items in the cell are various information, the resulting height of the cell should be variable.

My strategy is to programmatically build a cell as a UIStackView with a .Vertical axis, as in the code snippet as follows:

override func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {

    let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier("Cell", forIndexPath: indexPath)

    let sv = UIStackView(frame: tableview.frame)
    sv.axis = .Vertical
    cell.addSubview(sv)
    for i in information {
        let l = UILabel()
        l.text = i
        sv.addSubViewAndArrange(l)
    }

    return cell
}

Unfortunately, the cell size does not adjust to the content, and as a result I have to set the cell height myself, as follows:

func tableView(tableView: UITableView, heightForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> CGFloat {
    return cellHeight     // a constant
}

How could I fix that?

Answer 1

UIStackView is designed to grow its size according to the content. In order for that to work, you need to set up the constraints between the UIStackView and the UITableViewCell . For example, if UIStackView is first-item and UITableViewCell is it's super-view, then this is how the constraints look like in interface builder:

If you like setting up constraints in code, that should work too.
For example, assuming stackView and cellView are the names, then above constraints' Swift-code would look like:

stackView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
stackView.topAnchor.constraint(equalTo: cellView.topAnchor, constant: 0).isActive = true
stackView.bottomAnchor.constraint(equalTo: cellView.bottomAnchor, constant: 0).isActive = true
stackView.leadingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: cellView.leadingAnchor, constant: 0).isActive = true
stackView.trailingAnchor.constraint(equalTo: cellView.trailingAnchor, constant: 0).isActive = true

To demonstrate that this will work, I have this for the cellForRowAt function. Basically, it puts a number of UILabel inside the UIStackView and the label count is depending on the row number.

func tableView(_ tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UITableViewCell {
    let cell = tableView.dequeueReusableCell(withIdentifier: "TableviewCell", for: indexPath) as! TableviewCell
    for i in 1...indexPath.row + 1 {
        let label = UILabel()
        label.text = "Row \(indexPath.row), Label \(i)"
        cell.stackView.addArrangedSubview(label)
    }
    return cell
}

Here is the final result:

https://github.com/yzhong52/AutosizeStackview

Answer 2

I built this example I hope it helps, I've created a tableView which use a cell that contains a stackView and the views loaded in the stackView are gotten from a nib file

https://github.com/Joule87/stackView-within-TableViewCell