Where to place the code to change the properties of a UIView

If I'm creating a UIView programmatically and I wish to change the UIView properties (background, for example, or actually, messing with CALayers), must I place the code outside of UIView such as in the View controller? Can I put the code somewhere inside UIView?

I was checking out the CoreAnimationKioskSty开发者_StackOverflowleMenu example, its code is inside UIView but it's loaded from Nib and can be placed at awakeFromNib, so it doesn't seem to apply to my case.

That depends. Obviously, a good way to handle this is to use a xib file, as it is designed to hold data like this, but that isn't always the best answer for every situation.

If the view is meant to be reused frequently (like a button, or some widget) throughout the application, its best to store all that customization in a subclass of the UIView.

If its a single larger view that will always be managed by a UIViewController, you can keep some of the information in the UIViewController. However, if you end up subclassing a UIView anyway it's probably best practice to keep the data in the UIView.

As a general note, I believe its worth your time to push as much of this data into a xib using interface builder. Magic values (like colors or sizes) peppered through your code will always be a problem if you want to modify it. I have found modifying a xib to be much easier.

Actually there are some methods where you could place initialization/ customization code.

• (void)willMoveToSuperview:(UIView *)newSuperview;
• (void)didMoveToSuperview;

will get called as soon as u add the view as a subview to another view, at which point you already have the frame and all the properties, and you can do further customizing as you wish.

• (void)layoutSubviews -- generally used for changing subviews' frames and layout organization. Will get called each time the view needs to be redrawn by the system, or when you specifically call [self setNeedsLayout] on your UIView.

Hope this helps.