SwiftUI: How to Update NavigationView Detail Screens? - rest

Question

I've got an app that gets a list of vehicles from a REST backend server. It then uses that list to build a list of vehicles that can be tapped to show the details about one of them:
#State private var selectedVehicle: Vehicle?
#Binding var vehicles: [Vehicle]
List {
NavigationView {
ForEach( vehicles ) { vehicle in
NavigationLink( destination: VehicleDetailScreen( vehicle: vehicle ),
tag: vehicle,
selection: self.$selectedVehicle ) {
Text( vehicle.name )
}
}
}
}
struct VehicleDetailScreen: View {
var vehicle: Vehicle
var body: some View {
// Lots of rendering code omitted
}
}
So far, so good. This works nicely. The problem arises when we fetch updated information from the server. Updating the bound vehicles property works great for updating the list. But the detail screen is still showing data that's no longer relevant.
My first thought was just to pop the detail view off of the NavigationView. Unfortunately, SwiftUI doesn't provide any reliable way that I can find to do this in a two-column view on the iPad.
My next thought was that we needed to pass the vehicle in to VehicleDetailScreen as a #Binding too so that we can update it. But this is tough to do as well because we would need a reference to that binding so that we can cram updated values into it. The only way I can think of to do that would be to rework our network and model object code entirely so that it works like CoreData, keeping objects in memory and updating them with new values from the server, rather than generating new objects. This would be a good deal of effort, and obviously isn't something I'm keen to do if there's another option.
So I'm kind of stuck on this. Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions are very welcome!

Answer 1

Perhaps the concept of #Binding is somewhat confusing. From a #State var (parent view), to #Binding var (child view).
A struct Hashable to facilitate and reorder the elements of the array [Vehicle].
Something like this:
struct Vehicle: Hashable {
var name:String
//var otherItem: Any
}
struct ContentView: View {
#State var vehicle: Vehicle //the struct of your REST
#State var vehicles: [Vehicle] // the array of your REST
var body: some View {
List {
NavigationView {
ForEach(vehicles, id:\.self) { item in // loop the array to get every single item conform to the struct
NavigationLink( destination: VehicleDetailScreen(vehicle: self.$vehicle)) { // here to pass the binding
Text("\(self.vehicle.name)")
}
}
}
}
}
}
//detail view
struct VehicleDetailScreen: View {
#Binding var vehicle: Vehicle // here the binding
var body: some View {
Text("\(vehicle.name)")
}
}

Answer 2

If you want your detail views to update when data changes, you will have to make use of bindings.
As far as architecture goes, I would suggest to create so called Stores that hold data which can be used in multiple views. This, in combination with some static provider for Stores, makes it that you can easily access and modify data anywhere, and let your views update automatically.
When using UIKit, you would manually refresh data by calling reloadTable for instance. In SwiftUI this is not done. You could hypothetically manually trigger the view to update, but I would advice against this, as it is not the way SwiftUI was intended.
I've modified your code to show an example of this:
class StoreProvider {
static let carStore = CarStore()
}
class CarStore: ObservableObject {
#Published var vehicles: [Vehicle] = [Vehicle(id: "car01", name: "Porsche", year: 2016), Vehicle(id: "car02", name: "Lamborghini", year: 2002)]
}
struct Vehicle: Identifiable, Hashable {
let id: String
var name: String
var year: Int
}
struct CarOverview: View {
#ObservedObject var store = StoreProvider.carStore
#State var selectedVehicle: Vehicle?
var body: some View {
NavigationView {
List {
ForEach(store.vehicles.indices) { vehicleIndex in
NavigationLink(destination: VehicleDetailScreen(vehicle: self.$store.vehicles[vehicleIndex])) {
Text(self.store.vehicles[vehicleIndex].name)
}.onTapGesture {
self.selectedVehicle = self.store.vehicles[vehicleIndex]
}
}
}
}
}
}
struct VehicleDetailScreen: View {
#Binding var vehicle: Vehicle
func updateValues() {
vehicle.year = Int.random(in: 1990..<2020)
}
var body: some View {
VStack {
Text(vehicle.name)
Text("Year: ") + Text(vehicle.year.description)
}.onTapGesture(perform: updateValues)
}
}