An Introduction to SwiftUI’s ScrollViewReader

Programmatically Scrolling a ScrollView

Steven Curtis
5 min readSep 10, 2024
Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

SwiftUI is a rather nice development experience. The idea is that we can make adaptive UI for Apple platforms, reducing boilerplate code and even increasing productivity.

I like many of the tools that Apple have provided for us, and recently came across the ScrollViewReader that enables control of the scrolling behaviour of a ScrollView programmatically.

The ScrollViewReader

In iOS 14 Apple have provided us with a ScrollViewReader, where we can wrap ScrollView content inside a ScrollViewReader to gain access to the ability to scroll to any specific view as identified by a unique identifier.

Apple have documentation which includes an example, but that presupposes familiarity with the namespace property wrapper to identify views and I feel that can create an additional barrier to understanding this code.

So the ScrollViewReader itself is particularly useful if you wish to navigate to a specific item in a list or a collection (perhaps based on user input).

The Basic Example

A button that scrolls a ScrollView to the 25th item? Now you can with ScrollViewReader

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