Alignment guides in SwiftUI

This week we will talk about another great tool that we have in SwiftUI. The alignment guide is a way that we can use to speak to SwiftUI’s layout system. By using alignment guides, we can easily align views that live in different parts of a view hierarchy.

Basics

SwiftUI provides us a few container views that we can use to build our layout. You might already be familiar with VStack, HStack, and ZStack. All of these container views use alignments to regulate the position of child views inside the container. Let’s take a look at the very basic example.

VStack ( alignment : . leading ) { Text ( "Toronto" ) Text ( "Paris" ) Text ( "London" ) Text ( "Madrid" ) }

In the example above, we have a vertical container view that displays child views from the top to bottom. We set alignment to leading, and it means that VStack will use the leading point of every child view to align them.

VStack uses HorizontalAlignment enum to define possible alignments. On the other hand, HStack uses VerticalAlignment enum. It might be strange, but after all, it is logical. We can set the alignment of VStack only in the horizontal way because the container view controls the vertical direction. ZStack uses Alignment enum, which is the combination of HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment enums.

Overriding alignment guides

SwiftUI allows us to override standard alignments by using the alignmentGuide modifier. For example, we might need to align the bottom of Image and Text views in a horizontal stack. We can face the problem when image has some spacing inside a bitmap, and it looks not aligned very well. This is a perfect case for overriding an alignment guide.

struct ContentView : View { var body : some View { HStack ( alignment : . bottom ) { Image ( systemName : "zzz" ) . alignmentGuide ( . bottom ) { d in d [ . bottom ] + 8 } Text ( "Sleep" ) } } }

As you can see in the example above, we use alignmentGuide modifier to override the default value for .bottom alignment by adding 8 points. We read the default value by using subscript of d, which is an instance of ViewDimensions struct. ViewDimensions struct provides us access to the width and height of the view and default alignment values by using a subscript.

Custom alignment guides

We learned how to override default alignments in SwiftUI, but SwiftUI also allows us to create a custom alignment guide that we can use in container views to align its child views. But why we might need it? Custom alignments allow us to align views that live in different container views. Let’s take a look at the example below.

struct ContentView : View { var body : some View { HStack ( alignment : . center ) { Image ( systemName : "star" ) VStack ( alignment : . center ) { Text ( "Toronto" ) Text ( "Paris" ) Text ( "London" ) Text ( "Madrid" ) } } } }

We have a horizontal stack that contains an image and vertical stack with a few text views. I might need to align the image with the third text view, but it doesn’t look possible with the current configuration, because these views live in different containers. Fortunately, SwiftUI allows us to create a custom alignment and use it in the parent container view.

extension VerticalAlignment { struct CustomAlignment : AlignmentID { static func defaultValue ( in context : ViewDimensions ) -> CGFloat { return context [ VerticalAlignment . center ] } } static let custom = VerticalAlignment ( CustomAlignment . self ) } struct ContentView : View { var body : some View { HStack ( alignment : . custom ) { Image ( systemName : "star" ) VStack ( alignment : . leading ) { Text ( "Toronto" ) Text ( "Paris" ) Text ( "London" ) . alignmentGuide ( . custom ) { $0 [ VerticalAlignment . center ] } Text ( "Madrid" ) } } } }

In the example above, we use AlignmentID protocol to create a custom alignment. This protocol has the only requirement that we need to provide. SwiftUI will use the defaultValue whenever we leave it without custom value. The interesting fact is that the inner VStack didn’t specify a value for custom alignment, but it uses the value that provides its child view.

Conclusion

Today we learned how powerful could be custom alignments in SwiftUI. We also can use the overriding alignment technique to build super custom layouts. For example, we can build a grid view that arranges child views using alignments. I suggest you play around alignments to understand it well. It is something that can take time. 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!