SwiftUI Property Wrappers

Deciding when to use each of SwiftUI's key property wrappers

Quick reference

A flowchart that helps decide which property wrapper should be used.
Click to enlarge

Table of Contents

@State

The @State property wrapper is used inside of View objects and allows your view to respond to any changes made to @State. You use @State for properties that are owned by the view that it's contained in. In other words, a view initializes its @State properties itself. It does not receive its @State properties from another object.

struct StateExample: View {
  @State private var intValue = 0

  var body: some View {
    VStack {
      Text("intValue equals \(intValue)")

      Button("Increment") {
        intValue += 1
      }
    }
  }
}

Internally, SwiftUI will store your @State property's value and persist its value throughout re-renders of your view. This makes it a good fit for state that is managed by the view itself and should be persisted when SwiftUI must discard and recreate your view instance during a refresh.

Note that you should mark your @State properties private as a best-practice. No external sources should modify your @State properties.

Deciding if you should use @State

You should use @State if:

Note that you can also use @State on reference types (class) but changing properties on the instance itself won't count as an update. Not even if the property you changed is @Published. See @ObservedObject, @StateObject, and @EnvironmentObject for ways to handle this better.

@Binding

The @Binding property wrapper is used for properties that are passed by another view. The view that receives the binding is able to read the bound property, respond to changes made by external sources (like the parent view), and it has write access to the property. Meaning that updating a @Binding updates the corresponding property on the view that provided the @Binding.

struct BindingView: View {
  @Binding var intValue: Int

  var body: some View {
    VStack {
      Button("Increment") {
        intValue += 1
      }
    }
  }
}

This is an example of a view that receives a Binding and modifies it what a user taps a button. You would use this view as follows:

struct StateView: View {
  @State private var intValue = 0

  var body: some View {
    VStack {
      Text("intValue equals \(intValue)")

      BindingView(intValue: $intValue)
    }
  }
}

struct BindingView: View {
  @Binding var intValue: Int

  var body: some View {
    Button("Increment") {
      intValue += 1
    }
  }
}

Notice that I pass a binding to the @State wrapped intValue to BindingView by prefixing it with a $: $intValue. The projected value of a @State property is a Binding<T> that you can pass to child views so they can modify @State properties through the binding rather than directly.

Internally, SwiftUI will not keep a @Binding around when your view is discarded. It doesn't need to because the @Binding is always passed by an external source. Unlike @State where SwiftUI keeps the property around so its value persists when a view is discarded and recreated for a fresh render.

Deciding if you should use @Binding

You should use @Binding if:

@StateObject

Only available in iOS 14+, iPadOS 14+, watchOS 7+, macOS 10.16+ etc.

The @StateObject property is used for similar reasons as @State, except it's applied to ObservableObjects. An ObservableObject is always a reference type (class) and informs SwiftUI whenever one of its @Published properties will change.

class DataProvider: ObservableObject {
  @Published var currentValue = "a value"
}

struct DataOwnerView: View {
  @StateObject private var provider = DataProvider()

  var body: some View {
    Text("provider value: \(provider.currentValue)")
  }
}

Notice that DataOwnerView creates an instance of DataProvider. This means that DataOwnerView owns the DataProvider. Whenever the value of DataProvider.currentValue changes, DataOwnerView will rerender.

Internally, SwiftUI will keep the initially created instance of DataProvider around whenever SwiftUI decides to discard and recreate DataOwnerView for a fresh render. This means that a @StateObject for any given view is initialized only once.

SwiftUI sets the instance associated with your @StateObject aside and reuses it when the view that owns the @StateObject is initialized again. This means that your new view instance does not get a new instance of the property marked as @StateObject since it's reused.

In other words, a property marked as @StateObject will keep its initially assigned ObservedObject instance as long as the view is needed, even when the struct gets recreated by SwiftUI.

This is the same behavior you see in @State, except it's applied to an ObservableObject rather than a value type like a struct.

Deciding if you should use @StateObject

You should use @StateObject if:

@ObservedObject

An @ObservedObject is used to wrap ObservableObject instances that are not created or owned by the view that's used in. It's applied to the same types of objects as @StateObject, and it provides similar features, except a view doesn't create its own @ObservedObject instances. Instead, they are passed down to views like this:

struct DataOwnerView: View {
  @StateObject private var provider = DataProvider()

  var body: some View {
    VStack {
      Text("provider value: \(provider.currentValue)")

      DataUserView(provider: provider)
    }
  }
}

struct DataUserView: View {
  @ObservedObject var provider: DataProvider

  var body: some View {
    // create body and use / modify `provider`
  }
}

The DataOwnerView passes a reference to its @StateObject down to DataUserView, where the DataProvider is used as an @ObservedObject.

Internally, SwiftUI will not keep an @ObservedObject around when it discards and recreates a view if this is needed for a fresh render.

Instead, SwiftUI knows that the parent view will pass down an ObservedObject (which could be either a @StateObject if the parent owns the property, or an @ObservedObject if the parent doesn't own the property) that's used as the value for the property marked as @ObservedObject.

Deciding if you should use @ObservedObject

You should use @ObservedObject if:

@EnvironmentObject

Sometimes you have objects that are needed in various places in your app, and you might not want to pass these objects down to the initializer of each view you create. In those cases, you might want to make a dependency available to all children of a view, your App or a Scene.

You can achieve this with @EnvironmentObject:

struct EnvironmentUsingView: View {
  @EnvironmentObject var dependency: DataProvider

  var body: some View {
    Text(dependency.currentValue)
  }
}

Properties that are marked as @EnvironmentObject must conform to ObservableObject. They are configured by a parent object of the object that uses the @EnvironmentObject. So for example, we can inject an environment object from the App struct to make it available for us in all views that we create:

struct MyApp: App {
  @StateObject var dataProvider = DataProvider()

  var body: some Scene {
    WindowGroup {
      EnvironmentUsingView()
        .environmentObject(dataProvider)
    }
  }
}

An @EnvironmentObject shared the same functionality that an @ObservedObject has. Your view will re-render when one of the @EnvironmentObject's properties changes. The main difference is that @EnvironmentObject properties are made available on a much larger scale than @ObservedObject. In same cases even to your whole app.

Deciding if you should use @EnvironmentObject

You should use @EnvironmentObject if:

@Environment

The @Environment property wrapper is similar to @EnvironmentObject with one major difference. It's used to read values from the view's environment. If the value in the environment changes, your view is updated. You can't use this property wrapper to set or modify an environment property. To set an @Environment property on a view you need to use the .environment view modifier. A nice way to think of @Environment is this: @Environment is to @EnvironmentObject what @State is to @StateObject.

You can read a value from the environment as follows:

struct MyView: App {
  @Environment(\.colorScheme) var colorScheme: ColorScheme

  var body: some View {
    Text("The color scheme is \(colorScheme == .dark ? "dark" : "light")")
  }
}

To assign a value to a view's environment you'd write the following:

ContentView()
    .environment(\.managedObjectContext, Persistence.shared.viewContext)

You can add a custom property to your view's environment as follows:

// The type we want to use for the custom environment value
enum AppStyle {
    case classic, modern
}

// Our environment key
private struct AppStyleKey: EnvironmentKey {
    static let defaultValue = AppStyle.modern
}

// Register the key on SwiftUI's EnvironmentValues
extension EnvironmentValues {
    var appStyle: AppStyle {
        get { self[AppStyleKey.self] }
        set { self[AppStyleKey.self] = newValue }
    }
}

// Example usage
@main
struct PropertyWrappersApp: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            ContentView()
                .environment(\.appStyle, .classic)
        }
    }
}

Deciding if you should use @Environment

You should use @Environment if:

@FetchRequest

Fetch request is one of SwiftUI's persistence related property wrappers. You use it to retrieve data from Core Data. A brief example of how to use this property wrapper looks as follows:

struct ContentView: View {
    @FetchRequest(fetchRequest: MyModel.fetchRequest())
    var items: MyModel

    var body: some View {
        List(items) { item in
            Text(item.title)
        }
    }
}

Whenever the data loaded by @FetchRequest updates, your view will update too.

There are various overloads for the @FetchRequest initializer that I won't cover on this page; we'd quickly spiral into covering Core Data and how it should be added to a SwiftUI app. To learn more about that you can explore this talk. Or take a look at the Practical Core Data book for more details on Core Data and SwiftUI.

Deciding if you should use @FetchRequest

Use @FetchRequest whenever you want to fetch data from a Core Data store directly into your view.

@AppStorage

The @AppStorage property wrapper is an app-wide wrapper around UserDefaults. This means that it's great for storing simple key / value pairs. When the data in UserDefaults changes, your view reloads. You can update values in @AppStorage by assigning a value to your property.

Here's a simple example of using @AppStorage:

struct ContentView: View {
    @AppStorage("lastTap") var lastTap: Double?

    var dateString: String {
        if let timestamp = lastTap {
            return Date(timeIntervalSince1970: timestamp).formatted()
        } else {
            return "Never"
        }
    }

    var body: some View {
        Text("Button was last clicked on \(dateString)")

        Button("Click me") {
            lastTap = Date().timeIntervalSince1970
        }
    }
}

Note that @AppStorage isn't intended to hold a full data model for your app; it should be used for small, simple data.

Deciding if you should use @AppStorage

You should make use of @AppStorage when:

@SceneStorage

The @SceneStorage property wrapper is similar to @AppStorage except it only persists data local to the scene that your view is currently in. On iOS an app will typically have a single scene but on the mac and iPad an app can have several scenes. When a scene is temporarily torn down and restored later, your scene storage will be available again. If a scene is destroyed, all scene related data is destroyed too.

You should only use scene storage for state related data that's non-essential to your app.

You use @SceneStorage in a similar manner as @AppStorage:

struct ContentView: View {
    @SceneStorage("lastTap") var lastTap: Double?

    var dateString: String {
        if let timestamp = lastTap {
            return Date(timeIntervalSince1970: timestamp).formatted()
        } else {
            return "Never"
        }
    }

    var body: some View {
        Text("Button was last clicked on \(dateString)")

        Button("Click me") {
            lastTap = Date().timeIntervalSince1970
        }
    }
}

Deciding if you should use @SceneStorage

You should make use of @SceneStorage when:

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