Implicit stacking in SwiftUI

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SwiftUI is a declarative framework for building user interfaces on Apple platforms. One of the core concepts in SwiftUI is the idea of “stacking” views on top of each other to build complex layouts. In this article, we’ll explore the concept of “implicit stacking” in SwiftUI and how it can be used to create dynamic, responsive layouts. One of the benefits of implicit stacking is that it allows us to build layouts in a declarative way, by specifying the order in which views should be added to the hierarchy.

If you want to display multiple items in each row of a dynamic list in SwiftUI, the framework provides an intuitive solution that gives you great default behavior. SwiftUI will automatically create an implicit HStack to hold the items, which allows them to be laid out horizontally.

For instance, you can create a row that contains a small image on the left and text taking up the remaining space, and then display an array of fruits in a dynamic list.

Here’s an example of how this would look in code:

struct Nature: Identifiable {
    let id = UUID()
    let name: String
    let image: String
}

struct ContentView: View {
    let items = [
        Nature(name: "Leaf", image: "leaf"),
        Nature(name: "Atom", image: "atom")
    ]

    var body: some View {
        List(items) { nature in
            Image(systemName: nature.image)
            Text(nature.name)
        }
    }
}

You may have noticed that we did not need to explicitly place the image and text views into a Stack in order for them to be displayed. SwiftUI automatically handles this for us.


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