Structural identity in SwiftUI

Structural identity is the type of identity that SwiftUI uses to understand your views without an explicit identifier by using your layout description. This week we will learn how to improve performance and eliminate unwanted animations by using inert view modifiers in SwiftUI.

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Structural identity

Structural identity is how SwiftUI understands your view hierarchy and recognizes particular views without specific identifiers. Let’s look at the quick examples that demonstrate the logic behind the structural identity.

struct UserView: View {
    let user: User?

    var body: some View {
        if let user = user {
            LoggedUser(user: user)
        } else {
            AnonymousUserView()
        }
    }
}

print(Mirror(reflecting: UserView(user: nil).body))
// Mirror for _ConditionalContent<LoggedUser, AnonymousUserView>

As you can see in the example above, SwiftUI creates an instance of _ConditionalContent view that uses some condition to present one or another view. In our case, _ConditionalContent view uses if let binding to decide which views it has to show. SwiftUI destroys and creates the views whenever the condition changes. This process deallocates the destroyed view’s state and uses animation to remove the destroyed view.

struct AchievementView: View {
    let isEnabled: Bool

    var body: some View {
        if isEnabled {
            ComplexView()
        } else {
            ComplexView()
                .disabled(true)
        }
    }
}

In the current example, we use the if statement to enable or disable the view conditionally. We still use branching via if statement, and SwiftUI will destroy and create views accordingly. It might look correct, but we lose the state of the instance of ComplexView during the condition change because SwiftUI recreates view inside the branches of the if statement, and more, we get unwanted animation while swapping these views.

Let’s solve our issue by removing the if statement and moving the condition inside the disabled view modifier.

struct AchievementView: View {
    let isEnabled: Bool

    var body: some View {
        ComplexView()
            .disabled(isEnabled ? false : true)
    }
}

In the example above, we don’t have the if statement. We inline the condition inside the disable view modifier, which allows us to keep the structural identity of our view. SwiftUI understands that it is the same view but with a different value for the disabled view modifier.

Remember that you should use branching via if or switch statement only when you need to present different views. Always try to inline your conditions inside the view modifiers to keep your structural identity.

To learn more why SwiftUI uses structural identity, take a look at my “You have to change mindset to use SwiftUI” post.

Inert modifiers

SwiftUI framework is smart enough to understand and optimize your view hierarchy. It provides us with a set of inert view modifiers which doesn’t affect view tree, and you can use them for free. Let’s take a look at some of them in the example below.

struct AchievementView: View {
    let isEnabled: Bool

    var body: some View {
        ComplexView()
            .opacity(isEnabled ? 1 : 0)
            .padding(isEnabled ? 8 : 0)
    }
}

There is no changes in the view tree when you set the padding to 0 or opacity to 1. SwiftUI understands that and doesn’t apply these view modifiers. That’s why we call them inert view modifiers. Try to use them as much as possible to improve the performance of your view and remove unwanted transitions.

To learn more tips and tricks dedicated to view composition in SwiftUI, take a look at my “View composition in SwiftUI” post.

Conclusion

This week we learned about structural identity in SwiftUI. It is crucial to understand how it works to build great and performant views with SwiftUI. 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!