iOS AutoLayout multi-line UILabel

Following question is sort-of continuation of this one:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12789013/ios-multi-line-uilabel-in-auto-layout

The main idea is that every view is supposed to state it's "preferred" (intrinsic) size so that AutoLayout can know how to display it properly. UILabel is just an example of a situation where a view cannot by itself know what size it needs for display. It depends on what width is provided.

As mwhuss pointed out, setPreferredMaxLayoutWidth did the trick of making the label span across multiple lines. But that is not the main question here. The question is where and when do I get this width value that I send as an argument to setPreferredMaxLayoutWidth.

I managed to make something that looks legit, so correct me if I am wrong in any way and tell me please if you know a better way.

In the UIView's

-(CGSize) intrinsicContentSize

I setPreferredMaxLayoutWidth for my UILabels according to self.frame.width.

UIViewController's

-(void) viewDidLayoutSubviews

is the first callback method I know where subviews of the main view are appointed with their exact frames that they inhabit on the screen. From inside that method I, then, operate on my subviews, invalidating their intrinsic sizes so that UILabels are broken into multiple lines based on the width that was appointed to them.

There's an answer this question on objc.io in the "Intrinsic Content Size of Multi-Line Text" section of Advanced Auto Layout Toolbox. Here's the relevant info:

> The intrinsic content size of UILabel and NSTextField is ambiguous for multi-line text. The height of the text depends on the width of the lines, which is yet to be determined when solving the constraints. In order to solve this problem, both classes have a new property called preferredMaxLayoutWidth, which specifies the maximum line width for calculating the intrinsic content size. > > Since we usually don’t know this value in advance, we need to take a two-step approach to get this right. First we let Auto Layout do its work, and then we use the resulting frame in the layout pass to update the preferred maximum width and trigger layout again.

The code they give for use inside a view controller:

- (void)viewDidLayoutSubviews
{
    [super viewDidLayoutSubviews];
    myLabel.preferredMaxLayoutWidth = myLabel.frame.size.width;
    [self.view layoutIfNeeded];
}

Take a look at their post, there's more information about why it's necessary to do the layout twice.

It seems annoying that a UILabel doesn't default to its width for the preferred max layout width, if you've got constraints that are unambiguously defining that width for you.

In nearly every single case I've used labels under Autolayout, the preferred max layout width has been the actual width of the label, once the rest of my layout has been performed.

So, to make this happen automatically, I have used a UILabel subclass, which overrides setBounds:. Here, call the super implementation, then, if it isn't the case already, set the preferred max layout width to be the bounds size width.

The emphasis is important - setting preferred max layout causes another layout pass to be performed, so you can end up with an infinite loop.

Update

My original answer appears to be helpful so I have left it untouched below, however, in my own projects I have found a more reliable solution that works around bugs in iOS 7 and iOS 8. https://github.com/nicksnyder/ios-cell-layout

Original answer

This is a complete solution that works for me on iOS 7 and iOS 8

Objective C

@implementation AutoLabel

- (void)setBounds:(CGRect)bounds {
  if (bounds.size.width != self.bounds.size.width) {
    [self setNeedsUpdateConstraints];
  }
  [super setBounds:bounds];
}

- (void)updateConstraints {
  if (self.preferredMaxLayoutWidth != self.bounds.size.width) {
    self.preferredMaxLayoutWidth = self.bounds.size.width;
  }
  [super updateConstraints];
}

@end

Swift

import Foundation

class EPKAutoLabel: UILabel {

    override var bounds: CGRect {
        didSet {
            if (bounds.size.width != oldValue.size.width) {
                self.setNeedsUpdateConstraints();
            }
        }
    }
    
    override func updateConstraints() {
        if(self.preferredMaxLayoutWidth != self.bounds.size.width) {
            self.preferredMaxLayoutWidth = self.bounds.size.width
        }
        super.updateConstraints()
    }
}

We had a situation where an auto-layouted UILabel inside a UIScrollView laid out fine in portrait, but when rotated to landscape the height of the UILabel wasn't recalculated.

We found that the answer from @jrturton fixed this, presumably because now the preferredMaxLayoutWidth is correctly set.

Here's the code we used. Just set the Custom class from Interface builder to be CVFixedWidthMultiLineLabel.

CVFixedWidthMultiLineLabel.h

@interface CVFixedWidthMultiLineLabel : UILabel

@end 

CVFixedWidthMultiLineLabel.m

@implementation CVFixedWidthMultiLineLabel

// Fix for layout failure for multi-line text from
// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17491376/ios-autolayout-multi-line-uilabel
- (void) setBounds:(CGRect)bounds {
    [super setBounds:bounds];

    if (bounds.size.width != self.preferredMaxLayoutWidth) {
        self.preferredMaxLayoutWidth = self.bounds.size.width;
    }
}

@end

Using boundingRectWithSize

I resolved my struggle with two multi-line labels in a legacy UITableViewCell that was using "\n" as a line-break by measuring the desired width like this:

- (CGFloat)preferredMaxLayoutWidthForLabel:(UILabel *)label
{
    CGFloat preferredMaxLayoutWidth = 0.0f;
    NSString *text = label.text;
    UIFont *font = label.font;
    if (font != nil) {
        NSMutableParagraphStyle *mutableParagraphStyle = [[NSMutableParagraphStyle alloc] init];
        mutableParagraphStyle.lineBreakMode = NSLineBreakByWordWrapping;

        NSDictionary *attributes = @{NSFontAttributeName: font,
                                     NSParagraphStyleAttributeName: [mutableParagraphStyle copy]};
        CGRect boundingRect = [text boundingRectWithSize:CGSizeZero options:NSStringDrawingUsesLineFragmentOrigin attributes:attributes context:nil];
        preferredMaxLayoutWidth = ceilf(boundingRect.size.width);

        NSLog(@"Preferred max layout width for %@ is %0.0f", text, preferredMaxLayoutWidth);
    }


    return preferredMaxLayoutWidth;
}

Then calling the method was then as simple as:

CGFloat labelPreferredWidth = [self preferredMaxLayoutWidthForLabel:textLabel];
if (labelPreferredWidth > 0.0f) {
    textLabel.preferredMaxLayoutWidth = labelPreferredWidth;
}
[textLabel layoutIfNeeded];

As I'm not allowed to add a comment, I'm obliged to add it as an answer. The version of jrturton only worked for me if I call layoutIfNeeded in updateViewConstraints before getting the preferredMaxLayoutWidth of the label in question. Without the call to layoutIfNeeded the preferredMaxLayoutWidth was always 0 in updateViewConstraints. And yet, it had always the desired value when checked in setBounds:. I didn't manage to get to know WHEN the correct preferredMaxLayoutWidth was set. I override setPreferredMaxLayoutWidth: on the UILabel subclass, but it never got called.

Summarized, I:

• ...sublcassed UILabel
• ...and override setBounds: to, if not already set, set preferredMaxLayoutWidth to CGRectGetWidth(bounds)
• ...call [super updateViewConstraints] before the following
• ...call layoutIfNeeded before getting preferredMaxLayoutWidth to be used in label's size calculation

EDIT: This workaround only seems to work, or be needed, sometimes. I just had an issue (iOS 7/8) where the label's height were not correctly calculated, as preferredMaxLayoutWidth returned 0 after the layout process had been executed once. So after some trial and error (and having found this Blog entry) I switched to using UILabel again and just set top, bottom, left and right auto layout constraints. And for whatever reason the label's height was set correctly after updating the text.

As suggested by another answer I tried to override viewDidLayoutSubviews:

- (void)viewDidLayoutSubviews
{
    [super viewDidLayoutSubviews];
    _subtitleLabel.preferredMaxLayoutWidth = self.view.bounds.size.width - 40;
    [self.view layoutIfNeeded];
}

This worked, but it was visible on the UI and caused a "visible flicker" i.e. first the label was rendered with the height of two lines, then it was re-rendered with the height of only one line.

This was not acceptable for me.

I found then a better solution by overriding updateViewConstraints:

-(void)updateViewConstraints {
    [super updateViewConstraints];
       
    // Multiline-Labels and Autolayout do not work well together:
    // In landscape mode the width is still "portrait" when the label determines the count of lines
    // Therefore the preferredMaxLayoutWidth must be set
    _subtitleLabel.preferredMaxLayoutWidth = self.view.bounds.size.width - 40;
}

This was the better solution for me, because it did not cause the "visual flickering".

A clean solution is to set rowcount = 0 and to use a property for the heightconstraint of your label. Then after the content is set call

CGSize sizeThatFitsLabel = [_subtitleLabel sizeThatFits:CGSizeMake(_subtitleLabel.frame.size.width, MAXFLOAT)];
_subtitleLabelHeightConstraint.constant = ceilf(sizeThatFitsLabel.height);

-(void) updateViewConstraints has a problem since iOS 7.1.

In iOS 8, you can fix multi-line label layout problems in a cell by calling cell.layoutIfNeeded() after dequeuing and configuring the cell. The call is harmless in iOS 9.

See Nick Snyder's answer. This solution was taken from his code at https://github.com/nicksnyder/ios-cell-layout/blob/master/CellLayout/TableViewController.swift.