How to control which NavigationSplitView column is shown in compact layouts
Updated for Xcode 16.4
New in iOS 17
When you have a NavigationSplitView running in a compact size class – iPhones, Apple Watch, and any iPad when your app has been resized down to a small size – SwiftUI attempts to guess which of your split view columns is the best one to show. This guess is often correct, but you can control it by setting a preferred compact column for your Split View.
For example, this code forces the detail view to be preferred, which overrides SwiftUI’s default selection:
struct ContentView: View { @State private var preferredColumn = NavigationSplitViewColumn.detail var body: some View { NavigationSplitView(preferredCompactColumn: $preferredColumn) { Text("Sidebar View") } detail: { Text("Detail View") } } }
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If you provide a value that doesn’t exist – i.e., if you ask it to prefer the content view when you only have sidebar and detail – then SwiftUI will just choose the sidebar.
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