Is there a way for Interface Builder to render IBDesignable views which don't override drawRect:

Question

I very rarely override drawRect in my UIView subclasses, usually preferring to set layer.contents with pre-rendering images and often employing multiple sublaye

Answer 1

This answer is related to overriding drawRect, but maybe it can give some ideas:

I have a custom UIView class which has complex drawings in drawRect. You have to take care about references which are not available during design time, i.e. UIApplication. For that, I override prepareForInterfaceBuilder where I set a boolean flag which I use in drawRect to distinguish between runtime and design time:

@IBDesignable class myView: UIView {
    // Flag for InterfaceBuilder
    var isInterfaceBuilder: Bool = false    

    override init(frame: CGRect) {
        super.init(frame: frame)
        // Initialization code
    }

    required init(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) {
        super.init(coder: aDecoder)
    }

    override func prepareForInterfaceBuilder() {
        self.isInterfaceBuilder = true
    }

    override func drawRect(rect: CGRect)
    {
        // rounded cornders
        self.layer.cornerRadius = 10
        self.layer.masksToBounds = true

        // your drawing stuff here

        if !self.isInterfaceBuilder {
            // code for runtime
            ...
        }

    }

}

An here is how it looks in InterfaceBuilder: