Using UIKit views in SwiftUI

A few weeks ago, we talked about building views like PagerView and BottomSheetView from scratch in SwiftUI. SwiftUI is pretty young and misses some components that we expect to have out of the box. But it provides all the needed APIs to build whatever we want. However, sometimes we need to reuse UIKit views instead of making the SwiftUI versions. This week I want to talk to you about using UIKit views in SwiftUI.

UIViewRepresentable

One of the good examples of UIKit views that we don’t want to recreate in SwiftUI is MKMapView. Do you have any ideas on how to implement it in SwiftUI from scratch? Happily, we don’t need to do that. We can easily use MKMapView in SwiftUI by simply creating a wrapper view.

SwiftUI provides us UIViewRepresentable protocol that allows us to wrap UIKit views and use them from SwiftUI views. Let’s take a look at how we can cover MKMapView to use it in SwiftUI.

struct MapView : UIViewRepresentable { typealias UIViewType = MKMapView func makeUIView ( context : UIViewRepresentableContext < MapView > ) -> MKMapView { MKMapView () } func updateUIView ( _ uiView : MKMapView , context : UIViewRepresentableContext < MapView > ) { } }

As you can see in the example above, we create a MapView struct that conforms to the UIViewRepresentable protocol. UIViewRepresentable protocol has two requirements: makeUIView and updateUIView methods.

SwiftUI calls makeUIView only one time when it creates a view hierarchy. Whenever you change the state of the view, SwiftUI calls updateUIView method to update the view according to state changes.

Let’s ignore state changes for now and just create an empty MKMapView. Finally, we can use our MapView in SwiftUI.

struct RootView : View { var body : some View { MapView () . edgesIgnoringSafeArea ( . all ) } }

State and Binding

UIViewRepresentable view can store a state or has a binding like any other SwiftUI components. Let’s refactor our MapView to accept a binding for a center coordinate via init method.

struct MapView : UIViewRepresentable { typealias UIViewType = MKMapView @Binding var center : CLLocationCoordinate2D func makeUIView ( context : UIViewRepresentableContext < MapView > ) -> MKMapView { MKMapView () } func updateUIView ( _ uiView : MKMapView , context : UIViewRepresentableContext < MapView > ) { uiView . setCenter ( center , animated : true ) } }

As you can see in the example above, we finally implemented updateUIView. We want to center our map view whenever the binding of the center location changed.

Coordinator

UIKit views usually have delegates that allow us to handle some user interactions like cell selection in UITableView or visible region changes in MKMapView. What if we want to handle these actions in SwiftUI? Fortunately, UIViewRepresentable provides a Coordinator object that allows us to deal with delegates, data sources, and other UIKit stuff. The coordinator is a bridge between your UIKit and SwiftUI views. Let’s see how we can use it.

struct MapView : UIViewRepresentable { typealias UIViewType = MKMapView @Binding var center : CLLocationCoordinate2D func makeUIView ( context : UIViewRepresentableContext < MapView > ) -> MKMapView { let mapView = MKMapView () mapView . delegate = context . coordinator return mapView } func updateUIView ( _ uiView : MKMapView , context : UIViewRepresentableContext < MapView > ) { uiView . setCenter ( center , animated : true ) } func makeCoordinator () -> MapView . Coordinator { Coordinator ( self ) } final class Coordinator : NSObject , MKMapViewDelegate { private let mapView : MapView init ( _ mapView : MapView ) { self . mapView = mapView } func mapView ( _ mapView : MKMapView , regionDidChangeAnimated animated : Bool ) { self . mapView . center = mapView . centerCoordinate } } }

UIViewRepresentable has an optional requirement to implement makeCoordinator method. This method should create and return a coordinator object. We can fulfill all the needed delegate methods using this object. As you can see in the example above, we want to update our binding whenever the user moves the map. We might need to add some pins based on location changes.

Conclusion

This week we learned how to use UIKit views in SwiftUI. SwiftUI is a great framework, but sometimes we need to reuse UIKit classes that we had for years in iOS SDK. Fortunately, it is very effortless to do with help of UIViewRepresentable protocol. I hope you enjoy the post. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and ask your questions related to this post. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!