CATiledLayer blanking tiles before drawing contents

Question

All,

I'm having trouble getting behavior that I want from CATiledLayer. Is there a way that I can trigger the tiles to redraw without having the side-effect that their areas are cleared to white first? I've already subclassed CATiledLayer to set fadeDuration to return 0.

To be more specific, here are the details of what I'm seeing and what I'm trying to achieve:

• I have a UIScrollView with a big content size...~12000x800. Its content view is a UIView backed by a CATiledLayer.
• The UIView is rendered with a lot of custom-drawn lines
• Everything works fine, but the contents of the UIView sometimes change. When that happens, I'd like to redraw the tiles as seamlessly as possible. When I use setNeedsDisplay on the view, the tiles redraw but they are first cleared to white and there's a fraction-of-a-second delay before the new content is drawn. I've already subclassed CATiledLayer so that fadeDuration is set to 0.
• The behavior that I want seems like it should be possible...when you zoom in on the scrollview and the content gets redrawn at a higher resolution, there's no blanking before the redraw; the new content is drawn right on top of the old one. That's what I'm looking for.

Thanks; I appreciate your ideas.

Update:

Just to follow up - I realized that the tiles weren't being cleared to white before the redraw, they're being taken out entirely; the white that I was seeing is the color of the view that's beneath my CATiledLayer-backed view.

As a quick hack/fix, I put a UIImageView beneath the UIScrollView, and before triggering a redraw of the CATiledLayer-backed view I render its visible section into the UIImageView and let it show. This smooths out the redraw significantly.

If anyone has a better solution, like keeping the redraw-targeted tiles from going away before being redrawn in the first place, I'd still love to hear it.

Answer 1

I've found that if you set levelsOfDetailBias and levelsOfDetail both to the same value (2 in my case), then it only redraws the tiles that are touched by my setNeedsDisplayInRect: call, as you'd hope.

However if the levelsOfDetail is different to LODB, then any calls to setNeedsDisplayInRect: redraw all the tiles.

Answer 2

You could add another layer (possibly a CATiledLayer) behind the existing tiled layer. (Sort of a double-buffered solution.) You would call setNeedsDisplay: on the second layer from a timer that fires after a few seconds to ensure that that layer doesn't redraw at the same time as the front layer.

Answer 3

Another potential option is to use the same delegate to draw content to a bitmap context and swap the bitmap into the backing store once the content is refreshed. This should produce a flicker-free result. That being said, I can't tell you how this might be done, and one nice thing about CATiledLayers is they automatically generate tiles when you zoom and pregenerate tiles when you pan once zoomed in.

I would like to see how you implement your application. I have been looking for weeks to find an example that uses a combination of UIScrollView and a CATiledLayer-back view with a lot of custom drawn lines. Apple has some great sample code - but it all involves images rather than line art, so no help for me.

Answer 4

Having read through these answers without a solution, I discovered that tiling a page was the dominant background task.
Preparing my lo-res placeholder image on a high priority queue solved this issue - the images now appear while the tiling is occurring. Caching the placeholder images further improves their appearance - they appear before the tiling begins.
With newer devices, the tiling it so fast, these tricks might not matter. A sample PDF consisting of large scanned images (e.g. a scanned book) tiles the slowest in my experience, and makes for good test data.

Answer 5

I had the same problem with iPad.

The solution was more simple than I thought and far more simple than using UIImageView to render display before redrawing... :

Just don't set any background color for the Layer!

I had CATiledLayer set in a similar way:

layer = [[CATiledLayer alloc] init];
layer.masksToBounds = YES;
layer.contentsGravity = kCAGravityLeft;

//layer.backgroundColor = [[UIColor whiteColor] CGColor];

layer.tileSize = CGSizeMake(1004.0, 1004.0);
layer.levelsOfDetail = 16;
layer.levelsOfDetailBias = 8;

Note that I have commented out the line setting layer's background color to white. After that the white blank before redraw problem disappeared!

Let me know if anyone has tried that.