How to Use -updateConstraints
So should you use
updateConstraints()as suggested in the documentation? In this year’s Mysteries of Auto Layout (Part 2) WWDC session, Apple gives different advice:Really, all this is is a way for views to have a chance to make changes to constraints just in time for the next layout pass, but it’s often not actually needed.
All of your initial constraint setup should ideally happen inside Interface Builder. Or if you really find that you need to allocate your constraints programmatically, some place like
viewDidLoadis much better.updateConstraintsis really just for work that needs to be repeated periodically.Also, it’s pretty straightforward to just change constraints when you find the need to do that; whereas, if you take that logic apart from the other code that’s related to it and you move it into a separate method that gets executed at a later time, your code becomes a lot harder to follow, so it will be harder for you to maintain, it will be a lot harder for other people to understand.
So when would you need to use
updateConstraints? Well, it boils down to performance. If you find that just changing your constraints in place is too slow, then update constraints might be able to help you out. It turns out that changing a constraint insideupdateConstraintsis actually faster than changing a constraint at other times. The reason for that is because the engine is able to treat all the constraint changes that happen in this pass as a batch.
