How to Pop to the Root view in SwiftUI

Before iOS 16, there was no easy way to programmatically control view in a navigation stack.

But in iOS 16, SwiftUI deprecated NavigationView and came up with a new view, NavigationStack.

NavigationStack provides a way to programmatically manipulate the view in a navigation stack, making it easy to push and pop the view.

In this article, we will learn how to pop to the root view with NavigationStack.

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How to Pop to the Root view with NavigationStack

One of the NavigationStack initializers accepts an array of navigation paths.

You can think of Paths as a data source representing all views in a navigation stack.

• To pop a view, you remove that path from the array.
• To pop to the root view, you remove everything out of that array.

In this example, we use an Int to represent each view.

struct ContentView: View {
    // 1
    @State private var path: [Int] = []

    var body: some View {
        // 2
        NavigationStack(path: $path) {
            Button("Start") {
                // 3
                path.append(1)
            }
            .navigationDestination(for: Int.self) { int in
                // 4
                DetailView(path: $path, count: int)
            }
            .navigationTitle("Home")
        }
    }
}

struct DetailView: View {
    // 5
    @Binding var path: [Int]
    
    let count: Int
    
    var body: some View {
        Button("Go deeper") {
            path.append(count + 1)
        }
        .navigationBarTitle(count.description)
        .toolbar {
            ToolbarItem(placement: .bottomBar) {
                Button("Pop to Root") {
                    // 6
                    path = []
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

1 We declare an array of the navigation path. In this case, we use an Int to represent each view.
2 We use the path as a data source for NavigationStack, NavigationStack(path: $path).
3 By adding a new element to the array, the new view will get pushed to the navigation stack.
4 .navigationDestination is a new modifier that turns data into a view. In this case, we turn an integer into a view.
5 Since we want to be able to manage a navigation path within the DetailView, we need to accept a binding of the path.
6 We pop to the root view by remove all element from the path array.

Here is the result.