NSAutoLayout: How to add element dynamically

Question

I need to add an undefined number of NSButton to an NSView in code. The problem is that I can' t use constraintsWithVisualFormat: because i don' t know the name of the NSButton and also the number of button that I have. Anyone have a solution? Thanks!

Answer 1

When using constraintsWithVisualFormat:, you need to know the names of the variables that point to your NSButtons only if you use NSDictionaryOfVariableBindings to create the dictionary of views. You could just as easily build your own dictionary using whatever keys you like.

If your buttons are stored in an array, you can iterate through them and create constraints between each of them:

for ( int i = 1 ; i < buttonArray.count ; i++ ) {
    NSDictionary* views = @{ @"buttonOne":buttonArray[i-1] , @"buttonTwo":buttonArray[i] } ;
    NSArray* constraints = [NSLayoutConstraint constraintsWithVisualFormat:@"[buttonOne]-[buttonTwo]"  options:0  metrics:nil  views:views] ;
    // Use the constraints.
}