AutoLayout with hidden UIViews?

Question

I feel like it\'s a fairly common paradigm to show/hide UIViews, most often UILabels, depending on business logic. My question is, what is the best

Answer 1

I'm surprised that there is not a more elegant approach provided by UIKit for this desired behavior. It seems like a very common thing to want to be able to do.

Since connecting constraints to IBOutlets and setting their constants to 0 felt yucky (and caused NSLayoutConstraint warnings when your view had subviews), I decided to create an extension that gives a simple, stateful approach to hiding/showing a UIView that has Auto Layout constraints

It merely hides the view and removes exterior constraints. When you show the view again, it adds the constraints back. The only caveat is that you'll need to specify flexible failover constraints to surrounding views.

Edit This answer is targeted at iOS 8.4 and below. In iOS 9, just use the UIStackView approach.