UICollectionView auto scroll to cell at IndexPath

Question

Before loading the collection view user sets the number of image in the array of collection view. All of the cells don't fit on the screen. I have 30 cells and only 6 on the screen.

The question: How to scroll to the cell with desired image automatically at the load of UICollectionView?

Answer 1

I've found that scrolling in viewWillAppear may not work reliably because the collection view hasn't finished it's layout yet; you may scroll to the wrong item.

I've also found that scrolling in viewDidAppear will cause a momentary flash of the unscrolled view to be visible.

And, if you scroll every time through viewDidLayoutSubviews, the user won't be able to manually scroll because some collection layouts cause subview layout every time you scroll.

Here's what I found works reliably:

- (void)viewDidLayoutSubviews {
    [super viewDidLayoutSubviews];

    // If we haven't done the initial scroll, do it once.
    if (!self.initialScrollDone) {
        self.initialScrollDone = YES;

        [self.collectionView scrollToItemAtIndexPath:self.myInitialIndexPath
                                    atScrollPosition:UICollectionViewScrollPositionRight animated:NO];
    }
}

Answer 2

You can use GCD to dispatch the scroll into the next iteration of main run loop in viewDidLoad to achieve this behavior. The scroll will be performed before the collection view is showed on screen, so there will be no flashing.

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    dispatch_async (dispatch_get_main_queue (), ^{
        NSIndexPath *indexPath = YOUR_DESIRED_INDEXPATH;
        [self.collectionView scrollToItemAtIndexPath:indexPath atScrollPosition:UICollectionViewScrollPositionCenteredHorizontally animated:NO];
    });
}