How to add padding to a UIView?

Question

I could not find a way to do this with UIView, as I depict in the following picture: It portrays having a image background with a shadow. Is there anything of the shelf for padding, or do I need to add more child objects to achieve this effect?

Answer 1

I think this would be pretty straightforward to do, but you'll have to implement it yourself.

If I understand your question correctly you'd like to have a padding value added automatically to your subviews - for example, pass an X/Y value of 0, 0 for a button's frame, but have its actual position be 10, 10.

I haven't fully fleshed this out, but you'd probably need to create a UIView subclass that had two extra bits - firstly, a 'padding' property (probably a UIEdgeInset), and then override the setFrame setter to automatically add the correct amount of padding to a frame. You could, say, have an initWithFrame:padding: method to create objects. You could even have your UIView subclass automatically query the superview to obtain the padding.

There's a lot of scope here - so I guess to answer your question, no - there isn't anything off the shelf - but implementing it yourself is pretty achievable and probably quite fun as well!

(assuming you find doing this sort of thing fun, of course...)