Custom UIView for displaying a label on many ViewControllers?

Question

I'm new to objective-c and it's a a newbie question. I'm writing an app which has this custom looking label on many views. (edit) The label has two parts: main label that acts as a title and a smaller sublabel that has some short text. (/edit) It seems silly to put labels manually on all of the views so I started thinking about making a custom control that would consist of two labels: mainLabel and subLabel. I'm not sure what approach is better here. Should I make a custom UIView or is there a better way of doing it?

If customizing UIView is the right way, how should I handle setting of the labels? Is creating a protocol delegate that would make a ViewController implement label control initialization methods the right way of doing this?

EDIT: How do I reuse the custom UIView so later when the labels style changes, I don't have to change looks on each of them separatly, but to have some sort o template that's going to be used every time the custom UIView is used

I'll put the answer here for anyone who'd have the same question:

You should use a custom UIView to control setting the labels (check the answer below) together with a .xib file which will define a template for the looks of the label. If you're interested about UIView and .xib files check out this: How to use a xib and a UIView subclass together?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

You don't need a delegate relationship to simply set a pair of text labels. If you want to do a UIView subclass for a view with two labels, and simply add this view to your view controllers, then in your view subclass, right a method that would be similar to UILabel setText: method. It just needs to take two arguments.

So if mainLabel and subLabel are UILabel properties on your UIView subclass's .m file, you might do something like this:

In the UIView subclass's .h file:

@interface DoubleLabelView

@property (nonatomic,strong) NSString *mainText;
@property (nonatomic,strong) NSString *subText;

- (void)setText:(NSString*)mainText subText:(NSString*)subText;

@end

And then in the .m file:

@interface DoubleLabelView()

@property (nonatomic,strong) UILabel *mainLabel;
@property (nonatomic,strong) UILabel *subLabel;

@end

@implementation DoubleLabelView

- (void)setText:(NSString*)mainText subText:(NSString*)subText {
    self.mainText = mainText;
    self.subText = subText;
}

- (void)setMainText:(NSString*)mainText {
    _mainText = mainText;
    self.mainLabel.text = mainText;
}

- (void)setSubText:(NSString*)subText {
    _subText = subText;
    self.subLabel.text = subText;
}

---

If the positions of the labels on the custom view are constant, I'd recommend just using a .xib file to set up exactly how you want the custom view to look. And I might add a custom factory method that takes the manText and subText arguments and calls setText:subText: right then and there.

If you're subclassing UIView, the more code specific to the view you can contain within the subclass, the better.

---

In the same way I've added methods to the UIView to allow you to change the mainText, subText, or both at the same time in a single method call, you can continue to add methods such as this to change properties of your UIView.

If you want to reposition your labels, consider adding a pair of CGPoint properties:

@property (nonatomic,assign) CGPoint mainLabelPosition;
@property (nonatomic,assign) CGPoint subLabelPosition;

- (void)setPosition:(CGPoint)mainPosition subPosition:(CGPoint)subPosition;

And write methods for these similar to the ones I showed you for changing the text.

Answer 2

Create a subclass of UIView as below,

CustomView.h file

@interface CustomView : UIView
@property UILabel *mainLabel;
@property UILabel *subLabel;

-(void)showMainLabelWithText:(NSString *)text;
-(void)showSubLabel:(NSString *)text;

@end

CustomView.m file

@implementation CustomView

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame
{
    self = [super initWithFrame:frame];
    if (self) {
        // Initialization code
    }
    return self;
}
-(void)showMainLabelWithText:(NSString *)text{
    self.mainLabel =[[UILabel alloc] init];
    self.mainLabel.text =text;
    [self addSubview:self.mainLabel];
}
-(void)showSubLabel:(NSString *)text{
    self.subLabel =[[UILabel alloc] init];
    self.subLabel.text =text;
    [self addSubview:self.subLabel];
}