How to group views together in SwiftUI

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There are several ways to group views together in SwiftUI. If you want to treat multiple views as a single entity and apply a common set of modifications or layouts, you can use the Group view in SwiftUI. It is important to note that, due to technical limitations, a parent view can only contain a maximum of 10 child views at once. Using a Group view can help you work around this limitation.

1. You can use a Group view to wrap a collection of views together. The Group view doesn’t generate any visual output of its own, but it allows you to apply modifiers or layout to a group of views as a single entity. Note: If you attempt to add more than 10 views to a parent view in SwiftUI, you may encounter an error similar to ambiguous reference to member 'buildBlock()'. This is because the view building system in SwiftUI is only designed to support up to 10 views at a time. Attempting to add more than 10 views may cause errors and is not supported.

For example:

// Error ambiguous reference to member 'buildBlock()’
VStack {
    Text("Text 1")
    Text("Text 2")
    Text("Text 3")
    Text("Text 4")
    Text("Text 5")
    Text("Text 6")
    Text("Text 7")
    Text("Text 8")
    Text("Text 9")
    Text("Text 10")
    Text("Text 11")
    Text("Text 12")
}

// No error after grouping
VStack {
  Group {
    Text("Text 1")
    Text("Text 2")
    Text("Text 3")
    Text("Text 4")
    Text("Text 5")
    Text("Text 6")
    Text("Text 7")
  }
  Group {
    Text("Text 8")
    Text("Text 9")
    Text("Text 10")
    Text("Text 11")
    Text("Text 12")
  }
}

2. You can use a VStack (vertical stack) or HStack (horizontal stack) to layout a collection of views in a horizontal or vertical line.

3. You can use a ZStack (z-axis stack) to lay out views on top of each other.

4. You can use a List to display a collection of views in a vertically scrolling list.

VStack {
    Text("Text 1")
    Text("Text 2")
}

HStack {
    Text("Text 1")
    Text("Text 2")
}

ZStack {
    Text("Text 1")
    Text("Text 2")
}

List {
    Text("Text 1")
    Text("Text 2")
}

✍️ Written by Ishtiak Ahmed

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