Building Dynamic Lists in SwiftUI for iOS 15

Enhance your SwiftUI List Views

Photo by Amadej Tauses on Unsplash

Previously, we looked at how to use List views to create static list views. Static list views are useful for creating menus or settings screens in iOS apps, but List views become a lot more useful when we connect them to a data source.

Today, we’re going to look at a couple of examples of how you can use List views to display a dynamic list of data, such as a list of books. We will also learn how to use some of the new features that Apple added to the latest version of SwiftUI in iOS 15, such as pull-to-refresh, a search UI, and an easy way to use async/await to fetch data from asynchronous APIs, such as remote services.

Display a List of Elements

There are a number of ways to create lists, and as we will see later in this series, you can create both flat lists as well as hierarchical, nested lists. Since all list rows are computed on-demand, List views perform well even for collections with many items.

The easiest way to create a List view based on a collection of elements is to use its constructor that takes a RandomAccessCollection and a view builder for the row content:

Inside the view builder, we get access to the individual elements of the collection in a type-safe way. This means we can access the properties of the collection elements and use SwiftUI views like Text to render the individual rows, like in the following example:

As this view acts as the owner of the data we want to display, we use a @StateObject to hold the view model. The view model exposes a published property that holds the list of books. In the interest of simplicity, this is a static list, but in a real-world application, you…