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How to group views together

Paul Hudson @twostraws September 3rd 2021

Updated for Xcode 13.2

If you need several views to act as one – for example, to transition together – then you should use SwiftUI’s Group view. This is particularly important because, for underlying technical reasons, you can only add up to 10 views to a parent view at a time.

To demonstrate this, here’s a VStack with 10 pieces of text:

VStack {
    Text("Line 1")
    Text("Line 2")
    Text("Line 3")
    Text("Line 4")
    Text("Line 5")
    Text("Line 6")
    Text("Line 7")
    Text("Line 8")
    Text("Line 9")
    Text("Line 10")
}

Download this as an Xcode project

10 lines of text reading “Line 1” through “Line 10”.

That works just fine, but if you try adding an eleventh piece of text, you’ll get an error like this one: ambiguous reference to member 'buildBlock()’.

…almost certainly followed by a lot more error text.

This is because SwiftUI’s view building system has various code designed to let us add 1 view, 2 views, 3 views, or 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 views, but not for 11 and beyond – that doesn’t work.

Fortunately, we can use a group like this:

VStack {
    Group {
        Text("Line 1")
        Text("Line 2")
        Text("Line 3")
        Text("Line 4")
        Text("Line 5")
        Text("Line 6")
    }

    Group {
        Text("Line 7")
        Text("Line 8")
        Text("Line 9")
        Text("Line 10")
        Text("Line 11")
    }
}

Download this as an Xcode project

11 lines of text reading “Line 1” through “Line 11”.