How to use implicit stacking

Paul Hudson @twostraws September 18th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11 GM

What happens if you create a dynamic list and put more than one thing in each row? SwiftUI’s solution is simple, flexible, and gives us great behavior by default: it creates an implicit HStack to hold your items, so they automatically get laid out horizontally.

For example, if we wanted to make a row where we had a small picture on the left and the remaining space be allocated to a text field, we’d start with a struct to hold our data like this:

struct User: Identifiable {
    var id = UUID()
    var username = "Anonymous"
}

I’ve given both of those default values to make our example easier.

Once we have that, we could create an array of three users, and show them in a dynamic list, like this:

struct ContentView: View {
    let users = [User(), User(), User()]

    var body: some View {
        List(users) { user in
            Image("paul-hudson")
                .resizable()
                .frame(width: 40, height: 40)
            Text(user.username)
        }
    }
}

How to use implicit stacking

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