I am currently struggling with resolving what appear to be competing design issues, and (while I may be just demonstrating my own ignorance) I would like to share my thoughts in the hope that you may have useful insights.
For purposes of discussion, consider a large and complex data entry screen with multiple sections for input. For all of the usual reasons (such as reuse, performance management, etc) each of these sections is implemented as its own, separately-compiled View. The screen is, then, composed of a sequence of reusable components.
However, each of these components has internal structure and may contain multiple focusable elements (and internal use of .onKeyPress(.tab) {...} to navigate internally). And the logic of each component is such that it has an internal @FocusState variable defined with its own unique type.
So, obviously what I want is
- on the one hand, to provide a tab-based navigation scheme for the screen as a whole, where focus moves smoothly from one component's internals to the next component, and
- on the other hand ,to build components that don't know anything about each other and have no cross-component dependencies, so that they can be freely reused in different situations.
And that's where I'm stuck. Since focus state variables for different components can have different types, a single over-arching FocusState passed (as a binding) to each component doesn't seem possible or workable. But I don't know how else to approach this issue.
(Note: in UIKit, I've done things like this by direct manipulation of the Responder Chain, but I don't see how to apply this type of thinking to SwiftUI.)
Thoughts?