Development

Easy rounded corners on UITableViewCell image view

Here’s a relatively easy way to achieve rounded corners on the standard image view in a UITableViewCell:

cell.imageView.layer.masksToBounds = YES;
cell.imageView.layer.cornerRadius = 5.0;

Set this up when you create the cell (make sure you #import at the top, of course). It would appear the UIImageView control creates sublayers to display the actual image content, which is why we use the masksToBounds property to then clip any sublayers.

I noticed a lot of people are seeking answers to the silly behaviour of UITableView with the grouped (UITableViewStyleGrouped) style and images:

Images don’t get clipped to the rounded cell border, which looks nasty. This technique is one way to remedy that:

One caveat – due to the inexplicable way the image view within the table view cell scales image content, there’s not really a simple, sensible way to provide an inset margin from the table view cell boundary to complement this rounded border effect.

I tried setting the frame property of the UIImageView itself (cell.imageView.frame), as well as setting the frame of the image view’s layer. I also tried applying a scale transform to the layer, with strangely inconsistent results: Setting scale to, say, 50%, made the image view 40x40px, only a pixel or two smaller than the full size. This may be because another entity (the table view cell?) performs scaling of the content, instead of the actual image view; given that my original image was 80×80, a 50% scale would result in 40×40.

My solution was to steer clear of that nonsense and just provide appropriately scaled images straight to the image view. Here’s a simple category on UIImage to scale an image:

@interface UIImage (TPAdditions)
- (UIImage*)imageScaledToSize:(CGSize)size;
@end
 
@implementation UIImage (TPAdditions)
- (UIImage*)imageScaledToSize:(CGSize)size {
    UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(size);
    [self drawInRect:CGRectMake(0, 0, size.width, size.height)];
    UIImage *image = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
    UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
    return image;
}
@end

So, then I just do something like this in the UITableView data provider:

UIImage *image = account.image;
if ( image ) {
   cell.image = [image imageScaledToSize:CGSizeMake(38, 38)];
}

Sorted.