How to create a marching ants effect using lineDashPhase

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

“Marching ants” is the informal name used for animation of a selection: you see a dashed line around whatever you selected, and the dashes slowly move around the selection to show that it’s active.

iOS can achieve most of this effect for you when you’re using a CAShapeLayer. To try it out, first create a shape layer with a dashed stroke like this:

let layer = CAShapeLayer()
let bounds = CGRect(x: 50, y: 50, width: 250, height: 250)
layer.path = UIBezierPath(roundedRect: bounds, byRoundingCorners: .allCorners, cornerRadii: CGSize(width: 20, height: 20)).cgPath
layer.strokeColor = UIColor.black.cgColor
layer.fillColor = nil
layer.lineDashPattern = [8, 6]
view.layer.addSublayer(layer)

Now you need to create a CABasicAnimation to animate the lineDashPhase property. Annoyingly, the lineDashPattern – the part that describes the way the dashed are drawn – is actually an array of NSNumber so we need to boil it down to an integer with code like this:

layer.lineDashPattern?.reduce(0) { $0 - $1.intValue } ?? 0

With the line dash pattern used above – 8, 6 – that will result in toValue being set to 14.

Here’s the animation you need to give the above shape layer a marching ants effect:

let animation = CABasicAnimation(keyPath: "lineDashPhase")
animation.fromValue = 0
animation.toValue = layer.lineDashPattern?.reduce(0) { $0 - $1.intValue } ?? 0
animation.duration = 1
animation.repeatCount = .infinity
layer.add(animation, forKey: "line")

I used .infinity for the repeat count so that it lasts forever.