In a recent tutorial we covered how to combine views and briefly touched on dynamic cells within a List. In this tutorial we’ll look more closely at how you can bring in dynamic content in to a List.

Create a new project and make sure you select SwiftUI when the option is presented.

Open up ContentView.swift and just below the import line at the top of the file, add the following struct:

struct Message: Identifiable {
    var id = UUID()
    var from: String
    var date: String
    var subject: String
    var snippet: String
}

One of many things that make SwiftUI great is the ability to combine views. The template code when you create a new SwiftUI view contains the following:

struct ContentView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Text("Place Holder")
    }
}

The body variable is expecting some View. In the example above we are returning a Text view which contains a string “Place Holder”. If you preview this in the canvas you will see the words “Place Holder”, without quotes, in the centre of the view.

Swift provides the ability to combine views so that more views can be combined in to one and then returned. In our Stacks tutorial we explain this. In short, you can combine views in to a HStack, VStack, or ZStack and return the stack as one view.

SwiftUI allows us to make static table views by using a List view. The SwiftUI syntax makes the process extremely simple. Unlike UITableViewControllers that require you to manually specify that you are using static cells, and then have to assign the table view controller a class, you simply just add “List { }” to your code and insert all of the views you want in-between the curly braces.

When you create a SwiftUI view, the protocol defines that we need to return “some View”. The word “some” means that we are dealing with an opaque result type. This is a new feature added added in Swift 5.1. An opaque result type means that we must return one, and only one, of the specified type, in this case something that conforms to the “View” protocol.

This highlights a problem. Imagine if our view, ie… the part that the user interacts with on screen, was only able to show one Text field or perhaps one button, then interfaces would be incredibly boring.