How do I change names programmatically to tell apart UIViews in Xcode visual debugger?

Question

How do I rename views in Xcode visual debugger? It's a sea of UIViews so it's nearly impossible to tell which uiview a constraint is for.

UIViewControllers show titles while for UIViews unless it's a derived class it's UIView. How do you tell them apart?

Case to the point

this seems to be a duplicate of How to set the Identifier of a UIView in Xcode 4.5/iOS for debugging auto layout?

But https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12965014/how-to-set-the-identifier-of-a-uiview-in-xcode-4-5-ios-for-debugging-auto-layout has some good answers so why ask a duplicate? — matt, Jul 30 '19 at 12:05
Besides, when would this problem arise in real life? You’re never going to use a plain UIView. You always use a subclass. Plus in the view Debugger the diagram shows you what view it is. — matt, Jul 30 '19 at 12:09
this arises when you have container views. A few of them for example. — Anton Tropashko, Jul 30 '19 at 12:10

matt · Accepted Answer · 2022-01-22T17:02:16.563

Control-click the view in question and choose Print Description in the contextual menu:

<UIView: 0x7fbec8508420; frame = (30 34; 163 117); autoresize = RM+BM; 
    layer = <CALayer: 0x6000019c65c0>>

Often that will be enough to identify the view. If it isn't, you can ask the view questions, though the syntax is a little tricky:

(lldb) expr -l objc -O -- [(UIView*)0x7fbec8508420 backgroundColor]
<UIDynamicModifiedColor: 0x6000017c6f10; contrast = normal, 
    baseColor = <UIDynamicSystemColor: 0x6000019c6600; name = systemYellowColor>>

Another trick I sometimes use is to give the view an identifier. A little-known trick is that a layer has a name that you can use as you like. And a view has a layer. So I declare an extension:

extension UIView {
    @objc var name : String? { return layer.name }
}

Now you can ask the view for its name. You can assign the name in code or (using runtime attributes) in the storyboard.

My technique for giving a view a name and seeing it in the view debugger has a evolved a bit since I originally gave this answer, so I want to show what it looks like now:

extension UIView {
    @objc var debugName: String {
        get { layer.name ?? "" }
        set { layer.name = newValue }
    }
    open override var debugDescription: String {
        var proposedDescription = description
        if !debugName.isEmpty {
            proposedDescription.insert(
                contentsOf: "; name = '\(debugName)'",
                at: proposedDescription.index(proposedDescription.endIndex, offsetBy: -1)
            )
        }
        return proposedDescription
    }
}

The reason this is cool is that the debug name is shown automatically in the Xcode console during view debugging when you Print Description. I can't begin to describe how useful that is. Together with constraint identifiers, you can easily work out exactly what's going on.

How do I change names programmatically to tell apart UIViews in Xcode visual debugger?

1 Answers1

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