Pull To Refresh in SwiftUI
SwiftUI gets better and better every year, and in WWDC 2021 we heard about some great new additions and improvements. One such addition that this post is focusing on is the pull to refresh control; a missing UI element familiar from the UITableView in UIKit, but not available in the first two versions of SwiftUI.
Putting the pull to refresh functionality in action is pretty easy in SwiftUI. We only have to apply a specific view modifier on a List view, and keep one or two things in mind, but crucial to the app’s proper behavior. Let’s go through them.
Using pull to refresh
Consider the following simple example, where we have a list with country names and their flags:
For the sake of the demonstration here, the data is retrieved from a local, custom JSON file that contains a few European countries with URLs to their flag images. Even though there are just a few countries listed initially, the purpose is to add a new country to the top every time we pull to refresh the list.
In order to achieve that, we firstly need a source of truth for the data that we’ll present in the list:
