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

Paul Hudson @twostraws December 1st 2022

Updated for Xcode 14.2

Updated in iOS 16

SwiftUI’s NavigationLink can be used inside list rows to present new views when a row is tapped. If the NavigationLink wraps around your entire row, the system automatically understands to make the entire row tappable in order to present the new view.

There are two ways of specifying a navigation destination: by providing one explicitly for your link, or if you’re targeting iOS 16 and later we can use navigationDestination().

Important: If you can – if you don’t need highly custom navigation and you’re able to target iOS 16 or later – using navigationDestination() is strongly preferred, because it allows SwiftUI to instantiate your destination views lazily.

To demonstrate navigation, here’s a simple detail view that expects to be handled the name of a football player:

struct PlayerView: View {
    let name: String

    var body: some View {
        Text("Selected player: \(name)")
            .font(.largeTitle)
    }
}

We can now create a NavigationStack with a List inside, allowing the user to select any player:

struct ContentView: View {
    let players = [
        "Roy Kent",
        "Richard Montlaur",
        "Dani Rojas",
        "Jamie Tartt",
    ]

    var body: some View {
        NavigationStack {
            List(players, id: \.self) { player in
                NavigationLink(player, value: player)
            }
            .navigationDestination(for: String.self, destination: PlayerView.init)
            .navigationTitle("Select a player")
        }
    }
}

Using this modern value/destination approach to navigation breaks the work down into two steps:

The NavigationLink view stores a player as its value. This is a string in the code above, but it can be anything that conforms to Hashable.
That value gets sent to navigationDestination() when the link is tapped. We told it to watch for strings, so it will receive the player string that was tapped. We’re passing that directly to PlayerView, which expects a player name to work with.

To get that same result using the older API, we need to pass in a PlayerView for every navigation link, like this:

struct ContentView: View {
    let players = [
        "Roy Kent",
        "Richard Montlaur",
        "Dani Rojas",
        "Jamie Tartt",
    ]

    var body: some View {
        NavigationStack {
            List(players, id: \.self) { player in
                NavigationLink {
                    PlayerView(name: player)
                } label: {
                    Text(player)
                }
            }
            .navigationTitle("Select a player")
        }
    }
}

You can attach navigationDestination() to watch multiple different types of data, like this:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        NavigationStack {
            List {
                NavigationLink("Show an integer", value: 42)
                NavigationLink("Show a string", value: "Hello, world!")
                NavigationLink("Show a Double", value: Double.pi)
            }
            .navigationDestination(for: Int.self) { Text("Received Int: \($0)") }
            .navigationDestination(for: String.self) { Text("Received String: \($0)") }
            .navigationDestination(for: Double.self) { Text("Received Double: \($0)") }
            .navigationTitle("Select a value")
        }
    }
}

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

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