Why Use LayoutSubviews Anyway?

It works…

I previously wrote an article about the view drawing cycle, yet this turned out to be insufficient when I needed some help with shadows in a UITableViewCell subclass.

So I felt like more guidance should be out there around layoutSubviews. This article is the result of my investigation!

Before we start

Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging
This article has been developed using Xcode 12.5, and Swift 5.4

Prerequisites

• You’ll need to either be able to write an iOS application or write some Swift code in Playgrounds

Keywords and Terminology

layoutSubview: A function containing code called when the view is resized

This article

Background

The view lifecycle is extremely important especially while subclassing UIView. However I wanted to add shadows to my UITableView. What could possibly go wrong?

The failed attempt

I set up a UITableView like in the following example article and added a shadow around the UIImageView on the left-hand side.