Create a copy of a UIView in Swift

Question

Because objects are reference types, not value types, if you set a UIView equal to another UIView, the views are the same object. If you modify one

Answer 1

You can make an UIView extension. In example snippet below, function copyView returns an AnyObject so you could copy any subclass of an UIView, ie UIImageView. If you want to copy only UIView you can change the return type to UIView.

//MARK: - UIView Extensions

extension UIView
{
    func copyView() -> T {
        return NSKeyedUnarchiver.unarchiveObject(with: NSKeyedArchiver.archivedData(withRootObject: self)) as! T
    }
}

Example usage:

let sourceView = UIView()
let copiedView: UIView = sourceView.copyView()