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How to group views together

Paul Hudson @twostraws October 4th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11.2

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")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
    Text("Line")
}

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()'

…perhaps followed by a long list of errors like this:

SwiftUI.ViewBuilder:3:24: note: found this candidate
    public static func buildBlock<C0, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7, C8, C9>(_ c0: C0, _ c1: C1, _ c2: C2, _ c3: C3, _ c4: C4, _ c5: C5, _ c6: C6, _ c7: C7, _ c8: C8, _ c9: C9) -> TupleView<(C0, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7, C8, C9)> where C0 : View, C1 : View, C2 : View, C3 : View, C4 : View, C5 : View, C6 : View, C7 : View, C8 : View, C9 : View

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:

var body: some View {
    VStack {
        Group {
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
        }

        Group {
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
            Text("Line")
        }
    }
}

That creates exactly the same result, except now we can go beyond the 10 view limit because the VStack contains only two views – two groups.

How to group views together

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