SwiftUI SwiftData Quick Start Guide

Three Flowers that represent SwiftUI, SwiftData and XCode side by side. Beneath them sits the text "SwiftData Quick Start Guide."

A guide for helping you setup SwiftData with a SwiftUI project.

What is SwiftData?

Swift Data is a modern framework for on-device data storage, modelling and management intended to replace Core Data and provides a Swift-like API that integrates well with Swift UI.

Requirements

In order for your app to work with SwiftData you must:

Have an iPhone, iPad or Mac running iOS17, iPadOS17 or MacOS13 or higher.
Have an Mac running XCode 15 or higher.
Have iOS17 installed on a Mac running Xcode 15 or higher.

Apple Developer Resources

We recommend that you consult all of WWDC's videos on Swift Data.

Seperately, we also recommend you consult our standard SwiftData Quick Start Guide and associated resources.

Guide

We offer an open source starter project which is based off our UIKit SwiftData Guide. This can be found at the link below at the tutorials/swiftdata/101 branch.

The key difference is that there is no DataCoordinator or Notifications and everything is done within SwiftUI views.

Additional changes include:

Environment ModelContainer

A screenshot of the App struct within our open source project. Highlighted is how we have applied model containers to views within the app.

We used the .modelContainer modifier within the app to pass the model context to the SwiftUI views.

These use the @Environment(\.modelContext) property wrapper to access the model context within the SwiftUI Views.

A screenshot of the SampleScreen code highlighting how to use the model context through an environmental property wrapper.

As demonstrated by the CountScreen, these modelContainers persist across views.

A screenshot of the CountScreens showing how the modelContext persists across views.

@Query Macro for gathering all objects

A screenshot of the SampleScreen code highlighting the Query macro that we used to gather all the swift data objects for a model.

Instead of gathering all the objects using the DataCoordinator, we now use the @Query macro to gather all the objects.

This query updates as changes are made to the objects.

Updating data directly within SwiftUI Views

A screenshot of the SwiftDataListRow view code that highlights how we update a boolean through a toggle.

By applying @Bindable property wrapper to the SwiftData model parameter in a SwiftUI View, you can update data within a SwiftUI View.

Inserting and Deleting Objects directly in SwiftUI Views

A screenshot of the SampleScreen highlighting how we insert and delete objects directly in the view.

You can now insert and delete objects directly by using the @Environment(\.modelContext) property wrapper to gather the modelContext and using it with the associated functions.

Swift Previews

A screenshot of the code for the sample screen highlighting how we previewed the SwiftData by passing a .modelContainer to the preview.

We adapted the code to work with Swift previews.

A screenshot of the code for the SwiftDataListRow view. Highlighted is how we created a mock SwiftData model container and item for the Swift Preview to demonstrate how data would be created.

This also includes a way to preview mock items.

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Any Questions?

We are actively looking for feedback on how to improve this resource. Please send us a note to inquiries@delasign.com with any thoughts or feedback you may have.