How to make a scroll view move to a location using ScrollViewReader

Paul Hudson @twostraws April 25th 2024

Updated for Xcode 16.4

If you want to programmatically make SwiftUI’s ScrollView move to a specific location, you should embed it inside a ScrollViewReader. This provides a scrollTo() method that can move to any view inside the parent scrollview, just by providing its anchor.

For example, this creates 100 colored boxes in a vertical scroll view, and when you press the button it will scroll directly to the box with ID 8:

struct ContentView: View {
    let colors: [Color] = [.red, .green, .blue]

    var body: some View {
        ScrollViewReader { value in        
            ScrollView {
                Button("Jump to #8") {
                    value.scrollTo(8)
                }
                .padding()

                ForEach(0..<100) { i in
                    Text("Example \(i)")
                        .font(.title)
                        .frame(width: 200, height: 200)
                        .background(colors[i % colors.count])
                        .id(i)
                }
            }
        }
        .frame(height: 350)
    }
}

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For more control over your scroll, you can specify a second parameter called anchor, to control where your target view should be positioned after the scroll has completed.

For example, this will scroll to the same view as before, except this time place that view at the top:

struct ContentView: View {
    let colors: [Color] = [.red, .green, .blue]

    var body: some View {
        ScrollViewReader { value in        
            ScrollView {
                Button("Jump to #8") {
                    value.scrollTo(8, anchor: .top)
                }
                .padding()

                ForEach(0..<100) { i in
                    Text("Example \(i)")
                        .font(.title)
                        .frame(width: 200, height: 200)
                        .background(colors[i % colors.count])
                        .id(i)
                }
            }
        }
        .frame(height: 350)
    }
}

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