SwiftUI: Scrollview with both axes enabled produces layout mess - ios

Question

The Problem
In our brand new SwiftUI project (Multiplatform app for iPhone, iPad and Mac) we are using a ScrollView with both .horizontal and .vertical axes enabled. In the end it all looks like a spreadsheet.
Inside of ScrollView we are using LazyVStack with pinnedViews: [.sectionHeaders, .sectionFooters]. All Footer, Header and the content cells are wrapped into a LazyHStack each. The lazy stacks are needed due to performance reasones when rows and columns are growing.
And this exactly seems to be the problem. ScrollView produces a real layout mess when scrolling in both axes at the same time.
Tested Remedies
I tried several workarounds with no success.
We built our own lazy loading horizontal stack view which shows only the cells whose indexes are in the visible frame of the scrollview, and which sets dynamic calculated leading and trailing padding.
I tried the Introspect for SwiftUI packacke to set usesPredominantAxisScrolling for macOS and isDirectionalLockEnabled for iOS. None of this works as expected.
I also tried a workaround to manually lock one axis when the other one is scrolling. This works fine on iOS but it doesn't on macOS due to extreme poor performance (I think it's caused by the missing NSScrollViewDelegate and scroll events are being propagated via NotificationCenter).
How does it look?
To give you a better idea of what I mean, I have screenshots for both iOS and macOS.
Here you can watch short screen recording for both iOS and macOS.
Example Code
And this is the sample code used for the screenshots. So you can just create a new Multiplatform project and paste the code below in the ContentView.swift file. That's all.
import SwiftUI
let numberOfColums: Int = 150
let numberOfRows: Int = 350
struct ContentView: View {
var items: [[Item]] = {
var items: [[Item]] = [[]]
for rowIndex in 0..<numberOfRows {
var row: [Item] = []
for columnIndex in 0..<numberOfColums {
row.append(Item(column: columnIndex, row: rowIndex))
}
items.append(row)
}
return items
}()
var body: some View {
Group {
ScrollView([.horizontal, .vertical]) {
LazyVStack(alignment: .leading, spacing: 1, pinnedViews: [.sectionHeaders, .sectionFooters]) {
Section(header: Header()) {
ForEach(0..<items.count, id: \.self) { rowIndex in
let row = items[rowIndex]
LazyHStack(spacing: 1) {
ForEach(0..<row.count, id: \.self) { columnIndex in
Text("\(columnIndex):\(rowIndex)")
.frame(width: 100)
.padding()
.background(Color.gray.opacity(0.2))
}
}
}
}
}
}
.edgesIgnoringSafeArea([.top])
}
.padding(.top, 1)
}
}
struct Header: View {
var body: some View {
LazyHStack(spacing: 1) {
ForEach(0..<numberOfColums, id: \.self) { idx in
Text("Col \(idx)")
.frame(width: 100)
.padding()
.background(Color.gray)
}
Spacer()
}
}
}
struct Item: Hashable {
let id: String = UUID().uuidString
var column: Int
var row: Int
}
Can You Help?
Okay, long story short...
Does anybody know a real working solution for this issue?
Is it a known SwiftUI ScrollView bug?
If there were a way to lock one scrolling direction while the other one is being scrolled, then I could deal with that. But at the moment, unfortunately, it is not usable for us.
So any solution is highly appreciated! 😃

Answer 1

Is there any reason you don't want to use a Grid for this layout?
Here is the article I would suggest you read to solve this problem:
https://swiftui-lab.com/impossible-grids/