How to push a new view when a list row is tapped

Paul Hudson @twostraws September 18th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11.4

SwiftUI doesn’t have a direct equivalent of the didSelectRowAt method of UITableView, but it doesn’t need one because we can combine NavigationLink with a list row and get the behavior for free.

We need to put together a list with some content we can work with. First, we need some sort of data to show:

struct Restaurant: Identifiable {
    var id = UUID()
    var name: String
}

And we need a list row view that shows one restaurant at a time:

struct RestaurantRow: View {
    var restaurant: Restaurant

    var body: some View {
        Text(restaurant.name)
    }
}

Finally, we need a view that hosts a list of available restaurants:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        let first = Restaurant(name: "Joe's Original")
        let restaurants = [first]

        return NavigationView {
            List(restaurants) { restaurant in
                RestaurantRow(restaurant: restaurant)
            }.navigationBarTitle("Select a restaurant")
        }
    }
}

That code shows one restaurant in a list, but it isn’t selectable.

In order to make tapping a row show a detail view, we first need a detail view that can show a restaurant. For example, something like this:

struct RestaurantView: View {
    var restaurant: Restaurant

    var body: some View {
        Text("Come and eat at \(restaurant.name)")
            .font(.largeTitle)
    }
}

And with that in place we can now wrap our RestaurantRow rows in a NavigationLink, like this:

return NavigationView {
    List(restaurants) { restaurant in
        NavigationLink(destination: RestaurantView(restaurant: restaurant)) {
            RestaurantRow(restaurant: restaurant)
        }
    }.navigationBarTitle("Select a restaurant")
}

As you can see, that uses RestaurantView(restaurant: restaurant) as the destination for the row tap event, so that will create the RestaurantView and pass in the restaurant that was attached to the list row in question.

Notice how we have literally put a list row inside a navigation link – SwiftUI makes it work thanks to its remarkable composition abilities.