How to create custom bindings

Paul Hudson @twostraws September 3rd 2021

Updated for Xcode 13.3

When we use SwiftUI’s @State property wrapper it does a huge amount of work on our behalf to allow two-way bindings for user interface controls. However, we can also create bindings by hand using the Binding type, which can be provided with custom get and set closures to run when the value is read or written.

For example, this creates a trivial binding that just acts as a passthrough for another property:

struct ContentView: View {
    @State private var username = ""

    var body: some View {
        let binding = Binding(
            get: { self.username },
            set: { self.username = $0 }
        )

        return VStack {
            TextField("Enter your name", text: binding)
        }
    }
}

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Tip: When binding to a custom Binding instance, you don’t need to use the dollar sign before the binding name – you’re already reading the two-way binding.

Custom bindings are useful when you want to add extra logic to a binding being read or written – you might want to perform some calculations before sending a value back, or you might want to take some extra actions when the value is changed.

For example, we could create a stack of two toggle switches where both can be off and either one can be on, but both can’t be on at the same time – enabling one will always disable the other. Here’s how that looks in code:

struct ContentView: View {
    @State private var firstToggle = false
    @State private var secondToggle = false

    var body: some View {
        let firstBinding = Binding(
            get: { self.firstToggle },
            set: {
                self.firstToggle = $0

                if $0 == true {
                    self.secondToggle = false
                }
            }
        )

        let secondBinding = Binding(
            get: { self.secondToggle },
            set: {
                self.secondToggle = $0

                if $0 == true {
                    self.firstToggle = false
                }
            }
        )

        return VStack {
            Toggle(isOn: firstBinding) {
                Text("First toggle")
            }

            Toggle(isOn: secondBinding) {
                Text("Second toggle")
            }
        }
    }
}

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How to create custom bindings

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