Developing an iOS application is full of small bits of repetitive tasks. When you develop User Interface in code, you must create and handle constraints in code. Depending on what you have to do this could become extremely repetitive and complicated. You can write each constraint yourself, but this gets time consuming and could become messy and confusing.
I decided to create a function that accepts the child view and the parent LayoutGuide, this solved the issue for if you want the child to fill the parent. It however doesn’t solve all issues, example when you don’t want the bottom side to match the parent. Initially I decided to allow booleans to be passed in for each constraint to disable them and still allow them to be manual.
However this still left my code messy and complicated. So I decided to make it more inclusive of the other needs. In the next version I decided to allow up to 3 parameters for each of the side constraints, one named for the side to enable and disable it, a constant to allow a distance from the anchor, and a target for those times when it shouldn’t be pinned to the parent element.
However this wasn’t quite enough I needed two other capabilities. The first, one I needed the ability to enable and disable constraints inside of other classes. I return a class with they NSLayoutConstraint for each constraint allowing other classes to access these. The other major capability is the ability to have width and height anchor constraint, therefore I allow these constants to be passed in as parameters.
This utility class has cleaned up my code quite a bit, I hope others will find it useful. It is available on Github at https://github.com/all12jus/ConstraintUtils.swift.