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cocoacore-animationcore-plotnstableviewappkit

CorePlot plot view in NSTableView animates badly upon collapse/expansion

I have implemented a calendar view (GitHub). When you click on a day cell, a NSTableViewRow is inserted below, containing details for the day.

Insertion and deletion is animated as NSTableViewAnimationSlideDown and NSTableViewAnimationSlideUp respectively. The standard AppKit components seem to simply vanish during the animation. That was weird enough for a few test labels, but Core Plot and it's CPTGraphHostingViews don't play along nicely:

The plot view (containing 1 bar plot) appears outside the visible range of the row view and jumps into place once the row finished its animation. See animated GIF below:

Collapsind/Expanding

The row view contains a custom view with 2 labels and 1 plot view. The custom view is pinned to all 4 edges of to the row view via AutoLayout (in code). I added Auto Layout constraints to the plot and labels relative to the edges of the parent custom view. I had hoped this would resize the plot according to the animation, but it doesn't seem to resize but move instead (slide not shrink).

How can I stick the plot view to the row's bottom during animation and clip it while the row slides?

  1. Ordering the plot behind the rest of the table seems to be my first problem here.
  2. I have no clue why the plot, drawing above the rest or not, doesn't slide animated.
Solution

  • Turned out it was an issue with Core Plot being based on CALayers, which don't animate well in a solely view-based table. After fiddling with different ideas for a while, I got it working with setWantsLayer:YES, sent to the container view (not the NSTableView! That didn't work out well).

    This can be done in Interface Builder easily:

    setWantsLayer in IB