Working With SwiftUI Lists Features for iOS 15

Getting started with SwiftUI Lists after WWDC 21

Photo by Paico Oficial on Unsplash

Lists are one of the most widely used components in modern apps. They enable apps to display multiple rows of data in a column. In UIKit, lists can be developed using UITableView, and developers have to write a lot of code to implement lists. However, in SwiftUI, lists can be easily implemented using List view. Thanks to List, now developers can:

• Implement lists with shorter and cleaner code.
• Give a much better look and feel to their lists with less effort.
• Configure each row to contain various kinds of views like Image, Text, Button etc.
• Use the same code to extend the app to other Apple platforms like iPadOS and macOS.

And the most exciting part is that WWDC21 announced tons of features integrated into List making it not just more user-friendly, but also more developer-friendly. As you move forward through this tutorial, you’ll gain familiarity with the features like:

• Markdown support in Text view.
• The .formatted modifier, the clean and easy way to format date and time.
• The .refreshable modifier to refresh list.
• The .searchablemodifier to incorporate search.
• .swipeActions in List.
• Using .headerProminence to make List section headers more visible.
• Using .listRowSeparator and .listRowSeparatorTint to change the visibility and the color of row separators of List respectively.

Note: You’ll need Xcode 13. This tutorial was written using beta 5. To run this project on an iOS device, it must be running iOS 15 beta.

Getting Started

Download the starter project from this GitHub repository.

Build and run the starter project. You’ll see the FavMovies app’s screen that shows My Favorite Movies, as in the screenshot below:

Disappointed? Don’t worry, many changes are on your way.

Now, look at the folder structure. In addition to the boilerplate files and folders, you’ll see five folders: Extensions, Helpers, JSON…