Breaking forms into sections

Paul Hudson @twostraws July 19th 2021

Updated for Xcode 13.0

Updated in iOS 15

SwiftUI’s forms often work best when broken into sections, just like regular lists of content. How you break them up is down to you, but usually it works best when you group things according to their purpose – if it were an order page you might put items in one group, customization in another, and delivery in a third.

Helpfully, form sections are identical to list sections, which means you can re-use the same code in both places. So, you can add a header and/or footer to your sections, or use neither and just get some on-screen spacing between your sections.

As an example, this creates a form with two sections – the first with a segmented control and toggle, and the second with a save button:

struct ContentView: View {
    @State private var enableLogging = false
    @State private var selectedColor = "Red"
    @State private var colors = ["Red", "Green", "Blue"]

    var body: some View {
        Form {
            Section(footer: Text("Note: Enabling logging may slow down the app")) {
                Picker("Select a color", selection: $selectedColor) {
                    ForEach(colors, id: \.self) {
                        Text($0)
                    }
                }
                .pickerStyle(.segmented)

                Toggle("Enable Logging", isOn: $enableLogging)
            }

            Section {
                Button("Save changes") {
                    // activate theme!
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Download this as an Xcode project

An inset-list style form with two sections. The first section has a segmented picker, a toggle, and footer text. The second section has a blue-text button.