Making Swift Enums Conform to Identifiable Protocol.

If you intend to use Swift Enums in a List or ForEach, it’s essential to make your enum conform to the Identifiable protocol.

Here, we will explore the process of achieving this for two types of enums those are:

• Enum without associated values
• Enum with associated values

Identifiable Protocol Overview

The Identifiable protocol provides a way to uniquely identify items. To conform, a type must return something that meets two criteria:

1. It must be named ‘id’ with a generic type ‘ID’.
2. The ‘ID’ type must conform to the Hashable protocol.

public protocol Identifiable<ID: Hashable> {
    var id: Self.ID { get }
}

Simply, we need our enum to present a unique Hashable value as an id.

Enum without Associated Value

For enums without associated values, achieving conformance is straightforward since they automatically gain Hashable conformance. Here’s an example using a Direction enum:

enum Direction: Identifiable {
    var id: Self {
        return self
    }

    case north, south, east, west
}

In this case, the enum itself can be used as the ID since it already conforms to Hashable.

Enum with Associated Value

Enums with associated values don’t automatically conform to the Hashable protocol. However, by following a few extra steps, we can make them conform to the Identifiable protocol.

Conforming to Hashable

To make an enum with associated values conform to Hashable, ensure that all associated values adhere to Hashable and explicitly conform to Hashable in the enum declaration. As an example, let’s consider a Barcode enum:

enum Barcode: Hashable {
    case basic(Int)
    case qrCode(String)
}

Conforming to Identifiable

Once the enum conforms to the Hashable protocol, making it conform to Identifiable is similar to the process for enums without associated values:

enum Barcode: Hashable, Identifiable {
    var id: Self {
        return self
    }

    case basic(Int)
    case qrCode(String)
}