How can I make my Nib load correctly my customized UIScrollView subclass?

Question

I had an nice UIScrollView inside my nib, which worked nicely. Then I had some very special needs and subclassed UIScrollView. In my Nib, I changed the class in the identity inspector to my subclass.

But for some reason, my -initWithFrame: method gets never called when the nib loader builds up all those objects from the nib. Actually I didn't change anything right now in my subclass. And the scroll view just works fine. Expect that it seems to be a blank UIScrollView even if I told the nib it should be an SpecializedUIScrollView for testing purposes.

Is there something else I must consider when subclassing a UIScrollView while still using a Nib file to bring it into perspective?

My dedicated initializer looks like this:

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame {
    if (self = [super initWithFrame:frame]) {
        NSLog(@"Hello !!!!!!!!!!!!!");
    }
    return self;
}

I'm never seeing that Hello in the console, if I try to load that from the Nib. Of course, if I alloc and initialize that by myself, it works. But I dont want to position my scroll view programmatically around, if I can use that damn cool Interface Builder instead.

Answer 1

Objects in a nib or xib are stored as serialized objects, this may mean you have to use the awakeFromNib method because init methods are never called.

Answer 2

Extend initWithCoder, be sure to call the super method. It is during this super call that setFrame will be called on your class.

You can then re-use your standard initWithFrame call in initWithCoder, and the interface builder will control the frame size.

- (id)initWithCoder:(NSCoder *)aDecoder {
    [super initWithCoder:aDecoder]; // Required. setFrame will be called during this method.
    return [self initWithFrame:[self frame]];
}