Writing iOS Layout Constraints The Easy Way

Coming from a web-development background, native iOS development always feels a bit clunky to me when it comes to creating the layouts.

Yes, there is the Interface Builder and it is a great tool, but sometimes,

things get more generic and building the views and layouts can be more efficiently done by hand.

Except – layout constraints! Writing layout constraints can be tedious work.

Example, making an element the half of the width of its parent element in objective-c:

[self.view addSubview:centerView];

// Width constraint, half of parent view width
[self.view addConstraint:[NSLayoutConstraint constraintWithItem:centerView
                               attribute:NSLayoutAttributeWidth relatedBy:NSLayoutRelationEqual
                               toItem:self.view attribute:NSLayoutAttributeWidth
                               multiplier:0.5 constant:0]];

It is not much better in C# with Xamarin either:

View.AddSubview(centerView);

// Width constraint, half of parent view width
View.AddConstraint(
    NSLayoutConstraint.Create(centerView, 
        NSLayoutAttribute.Width, NSLayoutRelation.Equal, 
        View, NSLayoutAttribute.Width, 
        0.5f, 0f
   )
);

But behold! There is our ConstraintHelper!

ConstraintHelper.Attach(centerView).WidthOfParent(0.5f).Top().Center();

The ConstraintHelper is a small C# library to help with the layout constraints and it brings less common concepts like Method Chaining to the layout constraints.

ConstraintHelper is Open Source and can be forked from GitHub.