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Created by Daniele Margutti (@danielemargutti)

ScrollingStackContainer is an efficient scrolling UIStackView replacement, more suitable in situations when you are building a scrolling container with an heterogeneous number of items. It allows you to stack vertically UIViewController instances where the view is a simple fixed-height UIView or a UICollectionView or UITableView.

Motivation

A full article about the motivation behind this class is available on Medium (or in my personal blog). Check it here for full details about how the class works.

UITableView and UICollectionView are great when you need to display a number of relatively simple cells; when your layout became complex you may need to create different UIViewController which manages each different kind layout. These view controller may contains simple fixed-height UIView or complex UICollectionView/UITableView; in these cases you need to be careful because expading your scrollviews will destroy internal iOS caching mechanism. ScrollingStackContainer allows you to stack view controllers easily without any worry; it manages view controllers with scrolling collections automatically in order to reduce the amount of memory usage.

How to use it

It's very simple to implement: for fixed height views you should set a valid height (grater than zero). This can be done in your UIViewController's subclass in one of the following ways:

• set an height constraint on UIViewController’s .view
• … or return a value into preferredContentSize() function
• … or set the height via self.frame
• … or by implementing the StackContainable protocol and returning .view(height: <height>) with a valid value.

For view controllers which contains inner’s scroll views (for example table or collections) you need to implement the StackContainble protocol by returning .scroll(<inner scroll instance>, <insets of the inner scroll in superview>).

After that you should simply set the viewControllers property of your ScrollingStackContainer subclass:

	// view controller's view are stacked vertically in order
	self.viewControllers = [controller_2,controller_1,controller_3]

That’s all! All the business logic is managed by the class and you can enjoy!

See the example in this repository to get a live preview!

The following example is a vertical stack which contains a fixed height view controller, a view controller with a table inside and another fixed height controller.

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Installation

ScrollingStackContainer supports multiple methods for installing the library in a project.

Installation with CocoaPods

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Objective-C, which automates and simplifies the process of using 3rd-party libraries like ScrollingStackContainer in your projects. You can install it with the following command:

$ gem install cocoapods

Podfile

To integrate ScrollingStackContainer into your Xcode project using CocoaPods, specify it in your Podfile:

source 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git'
platform :ios, '8.0'

target 'TargetName' do
use_frameworks!
pod 'ScrollingStackContainer', '~> 0.5'
end

Then, run the following command:

$ pod install

Installation with Carthage

Carthage is a decentralized dependency manager that builds your dependencies and provides you with binary frameworks.

You can install Carthage with Homebrew using the following command:

$ brew update
$ brew install carthage

To integrate ScrollingStackContainer into your Xcode project using Carthage, specify it in your Cartfile:

github "malcommac/ScrollingStackContainer" ~> 0.5

Run carthage to build the framework and drag the built ScrollingStackContainer.framework into your Xcode project.

Requirements

Current version is compatible with:

• Swift 3.1+
• iOS 8 or later

Credits & License

ScrollingStackContainer is owned and maintained by Daniele Margutti.

As open source creation any help is welcome!

The code of this library is licensed under MIT License; you can use it in commercial products without any limitation.