XCODE 11, SWIFT 5. Drawing Lines, Boxes etc

Question

I have recently switched to Xcode 11 and Swift 5. Also switched my entire project from UISwift to Storyboard as I read it has many advantages.

Now I’m finding disadvantages, I can’t draw boxes/lines on my storyboard, I can do it using the code but that creates further problems with making changes to my project in storyboard and element constrains.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to draw background boxes/lines between text? In some instances I have 6 labels that would all go under one box, so I can’t use label background feature.

See the online example below, of grey boxes

Answer 1

Now I’m finding disadvantages, I can’t draw boxes/lines on my storyboard

The storyboard editor isn't a drawing program -- it's mainly for laying out views and connecting them to each other and to other objects e.g. view controllers. If you're trying to use it to draw lines and boxes, you're barking up the wrong tree.

The storyboard editor does let you configure the views you create, so for example you can set the image displayed by a UIImageView, or the text displayed in a label, or the background color of any view. The gray boxes in your example are easy to do by just setting the background color of a view to gray. Or better, use a table to display those views, and programmatically set the background color of the cells depending on their row.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to draw background boxes/lines between text?

There are some hacky options. For example, you could very easily create a view class that draws a horizontal or vertical line through it's center point, or a view class that draws a line around its perimeter for a box. (You can actually use key-value coding to set properties on the view's layer to do this even without creating a subclass, but it's not something you want to have to do every time you need a box.) Those are fine for occasional use, but if you have any complex drawing to do, it's probably time to write a view class that draws the necessary content in code.

In some instances I have 6 labels that would all go under one box, so I can’t use label background feature.

Those 6 labels should all be contained inside another view, so you'd just set the background color for the view that contains them. Again, from your example, it looks like those are rows in a table. Each row in a table is its own view (or "cell"), and it's easy to set the background color in the same code that configures the rest of the subviews in that cell.