The
UIView class uses an on-demand drawing model for presenting content. When a view first appears on the screen, the system asks it to draw its content. The system captures a snapshot of this content and uses that snapshot as the view’s visual representation. If you never change the view’s content, the view’s drawing code may never be called again. The snapshot image is reused for most operations involving the view. If you do change the content, you notify the system that the view has changed. The view then repeats the process of drawing the view and capturing a snapshot of the new results.
When the contents of your view change, you do not redraw those changes directly. Instead, you invalidate the view using either the
setNeedsDisplay or setNeedsDisplayInRect: method. These methods tell the system that the contents of the view changed and need to be redrawn at the next opportunity. The system waits until the end of the current run loop before initiating any drawing operations. This delay gives you a chance to invalidate multiple views, add or remove views from your hierarchy, hide views, resize views, and reposition views all at once. All of the changes you make are then reflected at the same time.