Xcode Snippet: View Debug Borders

Xcode 4 has the very neat feature of code snippets which you can extend with your own.

One thing I do regularly is to add a colored border around views to debug frames or autoresizing masks.

The snippet is just two lines of code:

<#view#>.layer.borderWidth = 1.0;
<#view#>.layer.borderColor = [[UIColor redColor] CGColor];

Just select the text above and drag it to the “User Scripts” section of the code snippets view.

• <#view#> is you can guess a placeholder for your view, e.g. self.view
• Do not forget to #import <QuartzCore/QuartzCore.h>and link against the QuartzCore.framework.
• Unfortunately there is a bug that Xcode does not sync placeholders with the same id (see Stackoverflow and rdar://10071607 to file a bug at Apple)