A Beginners Guide to Views in SwiftUI

Understand this

Photo by Shashank Sahay on Unsplash

A view in SwiftUI is a lightweight, transient object designed to be thrown away when the source for it is changed.

Unlike views in UIKit, SwiftUI views are not intended to be permanent or manually updated and instead of recomputed dynamically whenever the underlying data changes.

Views as Value Types

Views in SwiftUI are all struct, which means they are value types.

These views have advantages:

• struct are lightweight and performant
• Views are immutable making them predictable and easy to reason about

The View Protocol

All SwiftUI views conform to the View protocol which requires a single computed body property that describes the view’s content.

Here is a minimal example of a SwiftUI view:

struct MyView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Text("Hello, SwiftUI!")
            .padding()
    }
}

Note that the view is composed of another view ( Text(“Hello, SwiftUI!”) is another view)

The Data-Driven Paradigm