Following question is sort-of continuation of this one:
iOS: Multi-line UILabel in Auto Layout
The main idea is that every view is supposed to state it's "preferred" (intrinsic) size so that AutoLayout can know how to display it properly. UILabel is just an example of a situation where a view cannot by itself know what size it needs for display. It depends on what width is provided.
As mwhuss pointed out, setPreferredMaxLayoutWidth did the trick of making the label span across multiple lines. But that is not the main question here. The question is where and when do I get this width value that I send as an argument to setPreferredMaxLayoutWidth.
I managed to make something that looks legit, so correct me if I am wrong in any way and tell me please if you know a better way.
In the UIView's
-(CGSize) intrinsicContentSize
I setPreferredMaxLayoutWidth for my UILabels according to self.frame.width.
UIViewController's
-(void) viewDidLayoutSubviews
is the first callback method I know where subviews of the main view are appointed with their exact frames that they inhabit on the screen. From inside that method I, then, operate on my subviews, invalidating their intrinsic sizes so that UILabels are broken into multiple lines based on the width that was appointed to them.
It seems annoying that a UILabel doesn't default to its width for the preferred max layout width, if you've got constraints that are unambiguously defining that width for you.
In nearly every single case I've used labels under Autolayout, the preferred max layout width has been the actual width of the label, once the rest of my layout has been performed.
So, to make this happen automatically, I have used a UILabel subclass, which overrides setBounds:. Here, call the super implementation, then, if it isn't the case already, set the preferred max layout width to be the bounds size width.
The emphasis is important - setting preferred max layout causes another layout pass to be performed, so you can end up with an infinite loop.