UIView subclass with its own XIB [duplicate]

Answer 1

To use Yang's pattern with Auto-Layout, you need to add the following somewhere in the -awakeWithCoder: method.

    theRealThing.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = NO;

If you don't turn off -translatesAutoResizingMaskIntoConstraints it can cause your layout to be incorrect as well as causing a LOT of debugging nonsense in the console.

EDIT: Auto-layout can still be a pain. Certain constraints aren't respected, but other are (e.g. pinning to the bottom doesn't work but pinning to the top does). We're not exactly sure why, but you can work around this by manually passing constraints from the placeholder to theRealThing.

It's also worth noting that this pattern works just the same way with Storyboards as it does with regular .xibs (i.e. you can create a UI Element in a .xib and drop it into a StoryBoard View controller by following your steps.)