The hunger for magnificent design, animations and transitions is huge and nowadays designers are pushing developers to create beautiful views with lots of animations and smooth transitions.
Based on this, I will present some basic concepts of transitions and animations. This is the first in a series of three blogposts.
In this article, we will create a custom transition with View Controller Transitions and understand how it works based on UIKit. This is a powerful framework and you can use it to create smooth transitions and animate the elements of your view controller.
And to satisfy this hunger, nothing better than a Pizza App, right? Or maybe a salad if you don't like pizza...
 {
super.viewDidLoad()
navigationController?.delegate = self
viewModel.delegate = self
viewModel.getPizzas()
}
To trigger our animation every time you click in one of the cells, we store the IndexPath in a variable in the ViewModel for future reference, and for presenting the PizzaDetailViewController
extension PizzaViewController: UICollectionViewDelegate {
func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, didSelectItemAt indexPath: IndexPath) {
viewModel.indexPath = indexPath
let pizza = viewModel.pizzas[indexPath.row]
let detailVC = PizzaDetailViewController.instantiate()
detailVC.pizza = pizza
navigationController?.modalPresentationStyle = .custom
navigationController?.pushViewController(detailVC, animated: true)
}
}
So far there's nothing special other than assigning the NavigationController delegate to our ViewController.
Implementing the delegate
This is where things starts getting interesting 😀
We can have different animations, depending on whether you are presenting or dismissing a ViewController. To find out which one you should use, you can check the value of a property called operation with type UINavigationController.Operation. This property will tell us whether the user is presenting or dismissing a view.
In the first part of this example, we will implement only the presentation animation.
Your code should look like this:
extension PizzaViewController: UINavigationControllerDelegate {
func navigationController(_ navigationController: UINavigationController,
animationControllerFor operation: UINavigationController.Operation,
from fromVC: UIViewController,
to toVC: UIViewController) -> UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning? {
switch operation {
case .push:
return AnimationManager(animationDuration: 1.5, animationType: .present)
case .pop:
return AnimationManager(animationDuration: 1.5, animationType: .dismiss)
default:
return nil
}
}
}
Notice here that we are returning an object of type UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning which is our AnimationManagerclass. We'll cover that later. Hold on!
To make our life easier, both of our ViewControllers implement the protocol PizzaTransitionable. This protocol has two properties and we will use them in our animations. As we are dealing with a CollectionView and IndexPath, it's handy to have this kind of helper.
protocol PizzaTransitionable {
var backgroundView: UIView { get }
var pizzaImage: UIImageView { get }
}
Implementing the protocol on PizzaViewController
extension PizzaViewController: PizzaTransitionable {
var backgroundView: UIView {
guard
let indexPath = viewModel.indexPath,
let pizzaCell = collectionView.cellForItem(at: indexPath) as? PizzaViewCell
else {
return UIView()
}
return pizzaCell.containerView
}
var pizzaImage: UIImageView {
guard
let indexPath = viewModel.indexPath,
let pizzaCell = collectionView.cellForItem(at: indexPath) as? PizzaViewCell
else {
return UIImageView()
}
return pizzaCell.pizzaImage
}
}
Implementing the protocol on PizzaDetailViewController
extension PizzaDetailViewController: PizzaTransitionable {
var backgroundView: UIView {
return detailBackgroundView
}
var pizzaImage: UIImageView {
return detailPizzaImage
}
}
Right now we have everything ready to get our hands dirty.
 {
self.animationDuration = animationDuration
self.animationType = animationType
}
}
The AnimationType is a custom enum and it has only 2 cases. We use it to know when we need to animate the presenting or dismissing of a view.
enum AnimationType {
case present
case dismiss
}
We also need to make our AnimationManager conform to the UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning protocol.
The view controller will call the animator object from the transitioning delegate and will use it to perform the animation as you can see at the end of this snippet code.
extension AnimationManager: UIViewControllerAnimatedTransitioning {
// Return the animation duration defined when we instantiated the view.
func transitionDuration(using transitionContext: UIViewControllerContextTransitioning?) -> TimeInterval {
return TimeInterval(exactly: animationDuration) ?? 0
}
// Retrieve the ViewControllers and call the animation method
func animateTransition(using transitionContext: UIViewControllerContextTransitioning) {
guard
let toViewController = transitionContext.viewController(forKey: .to),
let fromViewController = transitionContext.viewController(forKey: .from)
else {
// We only complete transition with success if the transition was executed.
transitionContext.completeTransition(false)
return
}
// According to the animation type we call the method to animate the presenting or dismissing.
switch animationType {
case .present:
presentAnimation(
transitionContext: transitionContext,
fromView: fromViewController,
toView: toViewController
)
case .dismiss:
dismissAnimation(
transitionContext: transitionContext,
fromView: fromViewController,
toView: toViewController
)
}
}
}
Presenting the animation
For a clean and organized codebase, the logic is split into different chunks of code using extensions. That way the code is more readable and nicer as you can see in the example project! 🤓
But here it is shown separately:
For this animation, the duration is split in two parts. The first one should run in 1/3 of the duration and the second part the other 2/3 of the time.
// Assigning the context to a variable.
let containerView = transitionContext.containerView
// We split the whole animation in 2 different parts.
// The fist part should run in 1/3 of the time and the second part 2/3 of the time.
let firstPartDuration = (animationDuration / 3)
let secondPartDuration = (animationDuration / 3) * 2
Since delegate provides us a ViewController object, we need to cast it into the view type to access its objects.
// Cast the ViewControllers to their original type
guard let fromPizzaVC = fromView as? PizzaViewController else { return }
guard let toPizzaDetailVC = toView as? PizzaDetailViewController else { return }
Instead of animating the real objects of the view, we mirror them by creating new objects assigning the same position as the original ones. That way we can hide the ViewController and play with the "fake" objects.
// Mirroring the objects that we will animate.
let backgroundView = UIView()
let pizzaSnapshot = UIImageView()
// Storing the frame positions.
let backgroundFrame = containerView.convert(
fromPizzaVC.backgroundView.frame,
from: fromPizzaVC.backgroundView.superview
)
let pizzaSnapshotFrame = containerView.convert(
fromPizzaVC.pizzaImage.frame,
from: fromPizzaVC.pizzaImage.superview
)
// Setting up new objects with original attributes from the presented view controller.
backgroundView.frame = backgroundFrame
backgroundView.backgroundColor = fromPizzaVC.backgroundView.backgroundColor
backgroundView.layer.cornerRadius = fromPizzaVC.backgroundView.layer.cornerRadius
pizzaSnapshot.frame = pizzaSnapshotFrame
pizzaSnapshot.image = fromPizzaVC.pizzaImage.image
pizzaSnapshot.contentMode = .scaleAspectFit
Right after creating our "fake" objects, we need to add it to the containerView, then we can hide/show the objects from the original ViewControllers as you wish.
// Adding the subviews to the container view.
containerView.addSubview(fromPizzaVC.view)
containerView.addSubview(toPizzaDetailVC.view)
containerView.addSubview(backgroundView)
containerView.addSubview(pizzaSnapshot)
// Hidding/Showing objects to not/be displayed while animating the transition.
fromPizzaVC.view.isHidden = false
fromPizzaVC.collectionView.isHidden = true
toPizzaDetailVC.view.isHidden = true
Since the animations are running in a chain, we animate the objects using UIViewPropertyAnimator. That way, we have more control over our animations and the code is more readable.
// Background view final position.
let frameAnim = CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: UIScreen.main.bounds.width, height: UIScreen.main.bounds.height)
// Animate the view objects using PropertyAnimator
let animator1 = {
UIViewPropertyAnimator(duration: firstPartDuration, dampingRatio: 1) {
backgroundView.transform = CGAffineTransform(scaleX: 0.9, y: 0.9)
}
}()
let animator2 = {
UIViewPropertyAnimator(duration: secondPartDuration, curve: .easeInOut) {
backgroundView.frame = frameAnim
pizzaSnapshot.transform = CGAffineTransform(rotationAngle: .pi)
pizzaSnapshot.frame = containerView.convert(
toPizzaDetailVC.pizzaImage.frame,
from: toPizzaDetailVC.pizzaImage.superview
)
}
}()
And the final step is to define the sequence and start the animation. 🤗
// Prepare the animations sequence
animator1.addCompletion { _ in
animator2.startAnimation()
}
animator2.addCompletion { _ in
fromPizzaVC.collectionView.isHidden = false
toPizzaDetailVC.view.isHidden = false
backgroundView.removeFromSuperview()
pizzaSnapshot.removeFromSuperview()
transitionContext.completeTransition(true)
}
// Run animations
animator1.startAnimation()
Dismissing the animation
As you know, we are not going to implement the dismiss method in this article. But stay tuned because we'll prepare some interesting animations in the future. For now, let's just go back to the PizzaViewController without doing anything.
private extension AnimationManager {
func dismissAnimation(transitionContext: UIViewControllerContextTransitioning,
fromView: UIViewController,
toView: UIViewController) {
let containerView = transitionContext.containerView
containerView.addSubview(toView.view)
containerView.addSubview(fromView.view)
// We'll not animate anything. This will be covered in the next part of the article.
transitionContext.completeTransition(true)
}
}
Where to Go From Here?
Now that you've learned some of the basics animations when transitioning your ViewControllers you can try to improve and make some incredible transitions! The possibilities are endless!!
Resources
Photo by Rodolfo Clix from Pexels
Author
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