objective c - UIView set only side borders

Question

Is there a way to set the sides of the border of a UIView to one color and leave the top and the bottom another?

Answer 1

Nope—CALayer borders don’t support that behavior. The easiest way to accomplish what you want is adding an n-point-wide opaque subview with your desired border color as its background color on each side of your view.

Example:

CGSize mainViewSize = theView.bounds.size;
CGFloat borderWidth = 2;
UIColor *borderColor = [UIColor redColor];
UIView *leftView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, borderWidth, mainViewSize.height)];
UIView *rightView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(mainViewSize.width - borderWidth, 0, borderWidth, mainViewSize.height)];
leftView.opaque = YES;
rightView.opaque = YES;
leftView.backgroundColor = borderColor;
rightView.backgroundColor = borderColor;

// for bonus points, set the views' autoresizing mask so they'll stay with the edges:
leftView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleRightMargin;
rightView.autoresizingMask = UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleLeftMargin;

[theView addSubview:leftView];
[theView addSubview:rightView];

[leftView release];
[rightView release];

Note that this won’t quite match the behavior of CALayer borders—the left and right border views will always be inside the boundaries of their superview.