Composable styling in SwiftUI

This week I want to talk about the styling of views in SwiftUI. SwiftUI provides a pretty composable architecture for building your apps. Every screen in terms of SwiftUI is a function on some data which returns a view. So let’s talk today about composable and highly reusable styling options which we have in SwiftUI.

Branding

Whenever I begin a project, I start with defining my brand color for my User Interface. I use brand color as a tint for my buttons, switches, slider, etc. We can easily set the tint color on every view in the app by using accentColor modifier on the root view. Here is a quick example.

func scene ( _ scene : UIScene , willConnectTo session : UISceneSession , options connectionOptions : UIScene . ConnectionOptions ) { window = UIWindow ( windowScene : scene as! UIWindowScene ) window ? . rootViewController = UIHostingController ( rootView : RootView () . accentColor ( . purple ) ) window ? . makeKeyAndVisible () }

SwiftUI uses Environment feature to pass the values implicitly inside any child view. This is how we can give an accent color to every view across the app. To learn more about Environment feature of SwiftUI, check my dedicated post “The power of Environment in SwiftUI”.

Another must-have option which I want to enable on every view in my app is line limit. I want to make every text in my app multi-lined in the case when it is too long. I also need it when a user enables extra large font size for Dynamic Type. It is also straightforward to achieve by adding lineLimit modifier to my root view.

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

Button styles

I often have a few button types which I reuse across the app. Before SwiftUI, I was using inheritance to apply my styling to UIButtons in UIKit. But SwiftUI relies on composition instead of inheritance, that’s why it provides us ButtonStyle protocol which we can implement to reuse our button styles across the app.

import SwiftUI struct OutlineStyle : ButtonStyle { func makeBody ( configuration : Configuration ) -> some View { configuration . label . frame ( minWidth : 44 , minHeight : 44 ) . padding ( . horizontal ) . foregroundColor ( Color . accentColor ) . background ( RoundedRectangle ( cornerRadius : 8 ) . stroke ( Color . accentColor )) } } struct FillStyle : ButtonStyle { func makeBody ( configuration : Configuration ) -> some View { configuration . label . frame ( minWidth : 44 , minHeight : 44 ) . padding ( . horizontal ) . foregroundColor ( configuration . isPressed ? . gray : . white ) . background ( Color . accentColor ) . cornerRadius ( 8 ) } }

As you can see in the example above, we implement two button styles: OutlinedButton and FilledButton. To apply them to a button in SwiftUI, we have to use button style modifier. Let’s see how we can use them.

HStack { store . monthly . map { product in Button ( " \( product . localizedPrice ) / \( product . localizedPeriod ) " ) { self . store . buyProduct ( product ) self . presentation . wrappedValue . dismiss () } . buttonStyle ( OutlineStyle ()) } store . annually . map { product in Button ( " \( product . localizedPrice ) / \( product . localizedPeriod ) " ) { self . store . buyProduct ( product ) self . presentation . wrappedValue . dismiss () } . buttonStyle ( FillStyle ()) } } . padding ()

I want to note that you can use buttonStyle modifier on any view in SwiftUI and it utilizes Environment feature to share the style with any button inside it.

Text styles

Similar to buttons, I have a few different styling options for my text representation. Unfortunately, SwiftUI doesn’t provide something like TextStyle protocol. But instead, it gives us a much more powerful composition concept, and it is ViewModifier. Let’s take a look at how we can use ViewModifiers to style our Text views.

struct TitleStyle : ViewModifier { func body ( content : Content ) -> some View { content . font ( . title ) . lineSpacing ( 8 ) . foregroundColor ( . primary ) } } struct ContentStyle : ViewModifier { func body ( content : Content ) -> some View { content . font ( . body ) . lineSpacing ( 4 ) . foregroundColor ( . secondary ) } } extension Text { func textStyle < Style : ViewModifier > ( _ style : Style ) -> some View { ModifiedContent ( content : self , modifier : style ) } }

In the example above, we implement two style modifiers. We also provide an extension for Text component, which allows us easily apply any modifier to a Text. Now we can use our styles by adding textStyle modifier to any Text component.

VStack { Text ( "title" ) . textStyle ( TitleStyle ()) Text ( "content" ) . textStyle ( ContentStyle ()) }

ViewModifiers allow us to encapsulate and reuse any logic across the Views. To learn more about ViewModifiers, take a look at my dedicated post “ViewModifiers in SwiftUI”.

Conclusion

Today we learned how to create highly reusable styling components for SwiftUI by using features like ViewModifiers and Environment. 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!