draw outside of UIView's bounds from drawRect

I wouldn't recommend ever drawing outside of a view's bounds. Either your view needs to resize automatically to include your drawing or you need to have transparent overlapping views. Or both. I can't think of a situation that either of these cases wouldn't cover, but I may lack imagination. =)

Likely what is happening currently is that when the super view gets redrawn it tells the super view that it needs redrawn, resulting in erasing the drawing you are doing outside. It's been a while, anyone more knowledgeable can (should!) correct me here if I'm wrong.

I don't know if "Quartz Debug" (from the standard apple developer tools install, /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/Quartz Debug) works in the simulator, but it's worth a try. It has a mode that will show you when and how often redrawing takes place, with a border and optional delay on the refreshes.

You can do what you are asking, but you need to force redraw your sub-views every time you go outside the sub-view's bounds, meaning that your super-view needs to manually draw it's children inside of it's draw function. Essentially you would be throwing out apple's drawing paradigm and simply causing your sub-views to act like a drawing extension of your main view anyway.

Additionally, if your ranges are so dynamic you may want to consider drawing in percentages of the screen or super-view rather than in points, it may make more sense to code.