How to Create UILabel inside of UIScrollView – programmatically

This short tutorial will show you how to programmatically create UILabel inside of UIScrollView. UILabel will contain long text and we’ll set UIScrollView content size to fit UILabel size.
Create new project (view based application) and inside your main view controller find method viewDidLoad, tha’s where we going to add our code. First we need to allocate and initialize scroll view and label:

// alocate and initialize scroll
 UIScrollView *myScroll = [[UIScrollView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0f, 0.0f, 320.0f, 460.0f)];
 // alocate and initialize label
 UILabel *myLabel = [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0.0f, 0.0f, 320.0f, 460.0f)];

Scroll view and label have height of 460px since status bar is enabled. In case you disabled status bar in project .plist file set heights to 480px. Add some long text to our label, we need it so our scroll view have content size higher than current height, that way we’ll get some content to scroll. Set line break mode of our label to word wrap and set number of lines to zero. After all is set call sizeToFit method of UILabel to set label height.

// add long text to label
 myLabel.text = @"Lorem ipsum... long text here";
 // set line break mode to word wrap
 myLabel.lineBreakMode = UILineBreakModeWordWrap;
 // set number of lines to zero
 myLabel.numberOfLines = 0;
 // resize label
 [myLabel sizeToFit];

Scroll view needs update of its content size since label is now (if you added long text to it) higher than scroll view, so we set contentSize of our scroll view to same width as it was before and to height of label. Add label to scroll view, add scroll view to main view and release label and scroll view.

// set scroll view size
 myScroll.contentSize = CGSizeMake(myScroll.contentSize.width, myLabel.frame.size.height);
 // add myLabel
 [myScroll addSubview:myLabel];
 // add scroll view to main view
 [self.view addSubview:myScroll];
 // release label and scroll view
 [myLabel release];
 [myScroll release];

This piece of code is really simple, but very useful if you want to fill UIScrollView with some text and automatically adjust it’s content size to corresponding UILabel size.

Thanks for reading!