The power of Environment in SwiftUI

Environment is one of the unique features of SwiftUI which we didn’t have before in UIKit. Today I would like to show you all the benefits of using Environment in your apps.

Environment

Let’s start with describing the idea of Environment. We already discussed it previously in “Understanding Property Wrappers in SwiftUI”, but I want to start with basics. When you create and start your very first View in SwiftUI, the framework generates Environment for it. SwiftUI creates it automatically, and we don’t need to do something.

SwiftUI uses Environment to pass system-wide settings like ContentSizeCategory, LayoutDirection, ColorScheme, etc. Environment also contains app-specific stuff like UndoManager and NSManagedObjectContext. Full list of the passed values you can find in EnvironmentValues struct documentation. Let’s take a look at an example where we access Environment values.

struct ButtonsView : View { @Environment (\ . sizeCategory ) var sizeCategory var body : some View { Group { if sizeCategory == . accessibilityExtraExtraExtraLarge { VStack { buttons } } else { HStack { buttons } } } } }

By using @Environment property wrapper, we can read and subscribe on changes for the selected value. Here we have ButtonsView that reads Dynamic Type value from Environment and put buttons in VStack or HStack depending on the size category value. User can change Dynamic Type value in the system settings, and as soon as it happens, SwiftUI will recreate ButtonsView to respect the changes.

Now let’s see how we can modify Environment values. In SwiftUI we don’t have separation like Controllers or Views. Everything is a View, and because of that, we can easily modify Environment for an entire view hierarchy of the app by adding environment modifier to the root view.

func scene ( _ scene : UIScene , willConnectTo session : UISceneSession , options connectionOptions : UIScene . ConnectionOptions ) { window = UIWindow ( windowScene : scene as! UIWindowScene ) window ? . rootViewController = UIHostingController ( rootView : RootView () . environment (\ . multilineTextAlignment , . center ) . environment (\ . lineLimit , nil ) . environment (\ . lineSpacing , 8 ) ) window ? . makeKeyAndVisible () }

In the example above, we made all the text in the app center-aligned with line spacing 8pt without any line limit.

Environment inheritance

Every view inside SwiftUI inherits Environment from its parent view by default. But remember that you can override any values you want while creating the child view by attaching Environment modifier.

struct RootView { var body : some View { PlayerView () . environment (\ . layoutDirection , . leftToRight ) } } struct PlayerView : View { var body : some View { HStack { Button ( "previous" ) { } Button ( "play" ) { } Button ( "next" ) { } } } }

We don’t need to change the order of the buttons on right-to-left locales like Arabic. That’s why RootView set layout direction to leftToRight on PlayerView. It’s important to understand that this modification will apply only to PlayerView and all its child views.

View specific Environment values

We already covered how SwiftUI pass system-wide settings via Environment, but this is not the end. SwiftUI uses Environment to inject visible view specific values like isEnabled, editMode, presentationMode, horizontalSizeClass, verticalSizeClass, etc.

struct ModalView : View { @Environment (\ . presentationMode ) var presentation var body : some View { Button ( "dismiss" ) { self . presentation . value . dismiss () } } }

Here we use view-specific environment values to dismiss presented modal view.

Custom Environment keys

Now we know that SwiftUI provides us plenty of system-wide and view-specific values via the environment. However, I have to mention that we can create a custom environment key and push any value we want into the environment. Let’s take a look at how we can insert custom values into the environment.

import SwiftUI struct ItemsPerPageKey : EnvironmentKey { static var defaultValue : Int = 10 } extension EnvironmentValues { var itemsPerPage : Int { get { self [ ItemsPerPageKey . self ] } set { self [ ItemsPerPageKey . self ] = newValue } } } struct RelatedProductsView : View { @Environment (\ . itemsPerPage ) var count let products : [ Product ] var body : some View { ForEach ( products [ ..< count ], id : \ . id ) { product in Text ( product . title ) } } }

In the example above, we create a custom key that represents a count of items that can be presented on a screen. We also implement a view that uses that environment value. You can easily pass that value to any view you want by using the environment modifier.

Dependency Injection via Environment

Another great use-case for Environment is Dependency Injection. Every view has its copy of the parent’s Environment, and we can use it to add all ObservableObjects related to the current view.

struct CalendarView : View { @EnvironmentObject var store : CalendarStore var body : some View { NavigationView { List { ForEach ( self . store . sleeps ) { sleep in NavigationLink ( destination : SleepDetailsView () . environmentObject ( SleepStore ( sleep : sleep )) ) { CalendarRow ( sleep : sleep ) } } } } . navigationBarTitle ( "calendar" ) } }

In the example above, we use environmentObject modifier to pass an instance of SleepStore object. SleepStore should conform to ObservableObject protocol, which is used by SwiftUI to recreate the view during data changes. To learn more about ObservableObject check another post “Making real-world app with SwiftUI”.

The significant benefit of using Environment and not passing ObservableObject via the init method of the view is the internal SwiftUI storage. SwiftUI stores Environment in the special framework memory outside the view. It gives an implicit access to view-specific Environment for all child views.

Conclusion

As much as I use SwiftUI, I enjoy the concept of Environment. As you can see, it allows us to configure our app’s view hierarchy and make nice Dependency Injection out of the box. I hope you will love Environment feature of SwiftUI. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and ask your questions related to this post. Thanks for reading and see you next week!