How to show a menu when a button is pressed

Paul Hudson @twostraws December 1st 2022

Updated for Xcode 14.2

Updated in iOS 15

SwiftUI gives us a dedicated view for showing popup menus from buttons, helpfully called Menu. This can be created from a simple string or using a custom view, but either way you get to send in a variety of buttons to control what you want to appear in the menu.

Tip: On macOS, Menu is automatically rendered as a pulldown button.

For example, we could create a simple button with several options like this:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Menu("Options") {
            Button("Order Now", action: placeOrder)
            Button("Adjust Order", action: adjustOrder)
            Button("Cancel", action: cancelOrder)
        }
    }

    func placeOrder() { }
    func adjustOrder() { }
    func cancelOrder() { }
}

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You can also place menus inside menus if you want, which will cause iOS to reveal the second menu when the first option is tapped:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Menu("Options") {
            Button("Order Now", action: placeOrder)
            Button("Adjust Order", action: adjustOrder)
            Menu("Advanced") {
                Button("Rename", action: rename)
                Button("Delay", action: delay)
            }
            Button("Cancel", action: cancelOrder)
        }
    }

    func placeOrder() { }
    func adjustOrder() { }
    func rename() { }
    func delay() { }
    func cancelOrder() { }
}

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If you wanted a customized label using some text and an icon, you could use this:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Menu {
            Button("Order Now", action: placeOrder)
            Button("Adjust Order", action: adjustOrder)
        } label: {
            Label("Options", systemImage: "paperplane")
        }
    }

    func placeOrder() { }
    func adjustOrder() { }
}

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Finally, in iOS 15 and later menus can also have a primary action, which is triggered when the menu’s button is tapped rather than held down – press and release to trigger the primary action, or hold down to get the full menu of options.

So, we could create a menu that supports both simple taps as well as a full set of options:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Menu("Options") {
            Button("Order Now", action: placeOrder)
            Button("Adjust Order", action: adjustOrder)
            Button("Cancel", action: cancelOrder)
        } primaryAction: {
            justDoIt()
        }
    }

    func justDoIt() {
        print("Button was tapped")
    }

    func placeOrder() { }
    func adjustOrder() { }
    func cancelOrder() { }
}

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How to show a menu when a button is pressed

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