motion-pixate-layout

MotionPixateLayout

This project adds a simple DSL to your Rubymotion UIViewControllers to create subviews to be styled with Pixate.

The idea is inspired by Teacup, which has an awesome layout/subview DSL for laying out your controllers. While this DSL is great, Teacup brings in a lot of style/stylesheet features that are not useful to Pixate users. MotionPixateLayout also adds a convenient shorthand selector to quickly set the styleId and styleClass of subviews.

A quick example

class MyViewController < UIViewController
  pixate_layout '#my-view.fancy' do
    UILabel '#title-label.small.green', text: 'My Title'
    UIButton '#ok-button.call-to-action'
    UIView '#parent' do
      UILabel '#child'
    end
  end
end

This code hooks into UIViewController's viewDidLoad mode and:

• Sets view.styleId to 'my-view'
• Sets view.styleClass to 'fancy'
• Adds a UILabel with these attributes as a subview of the controller's view:
  • styleId: 'title-label'
  • styleClass: 'small green'
  • text: 'My Title'
• Adds a UIButton with these attributes as a subview of the controller's view:
  • styleId: 'ok-button'
  • styleClass: 'call-to-action'
• Adds a UIView with styleId of 'parent' to the controllers view with a child subview with styleId 'child'

Accessing subviews

MotionPixateLayout adds a subviews accessor to UIViewController that returns a hash of the controller's main view's subviews, where the keys are the styleId of the subview. To set the text of the title-label in the above example, we can access the subview by its id:

class MyViewController < UIViewController
  # pixate_layout { ... }

  def update_label_text
    subviews['title-label'].text = 'An updated title'
  end
end

Context and lifecycle

Be aware that inside the pixate_layout block is instance_eval'ed in the context of a proxy object, so you can't call methods on or add instance variables to your controller there. MotionPixateLayout adds 2 lifecycle hooks, before_pixate_layout and after_pixate_layout that execute in the context of your controller instance before and after the layout block, respectively.

class MyViewController < UIViewController
  pixate_layout do
    @layout = true # Does not set an instance variable in controller
  end

  before_pixate_layout do
    @layout = true # sets @layout instance variable in controller
  end

  after_pixate_layout do
    @layout = true # sets @layout instance variable in controller
  end
end

Installation

If you're using Bundler, just add gem 'motion-pixate-layout' to your Gemfile, and bundle install.

Make sure you've vendored the Pixate framework and set up motion-pixate.

To-do

• Generalize to work with NUI in addition to Pixate (rename?)
• More examples

Suggestions? Comments?

I'd love some.

Contributions

Are welcome. Please fork and submit a pull request with some specs.