Swift UIView background color opacity

I have a UIView with a UILabel in it. I want the UIView to have white background color, but with an opacity of 50%. The problem whith setting view.alpha = 0.5 is that the label will have an opacity of 50% as well, so I figured out that it maybe would be possible to have a UIView with white background color and opacity (white_view), and then have another UIView with the label (label_view). Then add the "white_view" to "label_view" by doing this: label_view.addSubview(white_view). This apparently doesn't work. I'd like to do like: label_view.backgroundView(white_view) but you can't set a background view on a UIView like you can do in a UICollectionView for instance.

Does anyone have any clue of how to solve this?

EDIT Because several answers are approx the same I'll type it here. Now I've tried even these:

label_view1.backgroundColor = UIColor.whiteColor().colorWithAlphaComponent(0.5)
label_view1.addSubview(firstPlacelbl)
endGameView.addSubview(label_view1)

and

label_view1.backgroundColor = UIColor(white: 1, alpha: 0.5)
label_view1.addSubview(firstPlacelbl)
endGameView.addSubview(label_view1)

And still the label is also affected by the alpha, and it gets an opacity of 50%. I don't get it what I do wrong because I only set the colors alpha to 0.5 and not the labels. Any ideas?

Solution 1:

You can set background color of view to the UIColor with alpha, and not affect view.alpha:

view.backgroundColor = UIColor(white: 1, alpha: 0.5)

or

view.backgroundColor = UIColor.red.withAlphaComponent(0.5)

Solution 2:

Setting alpha property of a view affects its subviews. If you want just transparent background set view's backgroundColor proprty to a color that has alpha component smaller than 1.

view.backgroundColor = UIColor.white.withAlphaComponent(0.5)

Solution 3:

For Swift 4.x and above

yourView.backgroundColor = UIColor.black.withAlphaComponent(0.5)

Solution 4:

You can also set it from InterfaceBuilder by changing color's opacity:

Solution 5:

The problem you have found is that view is different from your UIView. 'view' refers to the entire view. For example your home screen is a view.

You need to clearly separate the entire 'view' your 'UIView' and your 'UILabel'

You can accomplish this by going to your storyboard, clicking on the item, Identity Inspector, and changing the Restoration ID.

Now to access each item in your code using the restoration ID