Simply mask a UIView with a rectangle

Question

I want to know how to simply mask the visible area of a UIView of any kind. All the answers/tutorials I've read so far describe masking with an image, gradient or creating round corners which is way more advanced than what I am after.

Example: I have a UIView with the bounds (0, 0, 100, 100) and I want to cut away the right half of the view using a mask. Therefore my mask frame would be (0, 0, 50, 100).

Any idea how to do this simply? I don't want to override the drawrect method since this should be applicable to any UIView.

I've tried this but it just makes the whole view invisible.

CGRect mask = CGRectMake(0, 0, 50, 100);
UIView *maskView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:mask];
viewToMask.layer.mask = maskView.layer;

Answer 1

Thanks to the link from MSK, this is the way I went with which works well:

// Create a mask layer and the frame to determine what will be visible in the view.
CAShapeLayer *maskLayer = [[CAShapeLayer alloc] init];
CGRect maskRect = CGRectMake(0, 0, 50, 100);

// Create a path with the rectangle in it.
CGPathRef path = CGPathCreateWithRect(maskRect, NULL);

// Set the path to the mask layer.
maskLayer.path = path;

// Release the path since it's not covered by ARC.
CGPathRelease(path);

// Set the mask of the view.
viewToMask.layer.mask = maskLayer;