Swift UI show modal sheet with tab bar visible - swiftui

Question

Is there anyway to keep the tab bar showing while presenting a modal / sheet view?
Here is a minimal failing example.
import SwiftUI
struct SheetView: View {
#Environment(\.dismiss) var dismiss
var body: some View {
Button("Press to dismiss") {
dismiss()
}
.padding()
}
}
struct Tab1: View {
#State private var showingSheet = false
var body: some View {
Button("Show Sheet") {
showingSheet.toggle()
}
.sheet(isPresented: $showingSheet) {
SheetView()
}
}
}
struct MainView: View {
var body: some View {
TabView {
Tab1()
.tabItem {
Label("Tab 1", systemImage: "heart")
}
}
}
}
struct ContentView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
static var previews: some View {
MainView()
}
}

Answer 1

Thanks for answering my question in the comments.
Unfortunately the standard means of presenting views in SwiftUI is that they are truly modal – they capture the whole interaction context for the current scene, and you can’t interact with anything else until the modal is dismissed.
This is also the case for iPadOS. Even though a modal presented with .sheet on an iPad allows much more of the underlying view to be visible, you can’t interact with it until the sheet disappears. You can interact with different parts of the app by running two scenes side-by-side in split screen mode, but each half is a separate scene and any presented sheets are modal for that scene.
If you want one tab to optionally present a view over its usual content but still allow access to the tab view and its other tabs, that’s not a modal context and SwiftUI’s built-in sheet won’t work. You will have to implement something yourself - but I think that’s doable.
Rather than using .sheet, you could optionally add an overlay to your Tab1 view, using the same boolean state variable showingSheet. In this approach, the default dismiss environment variable won’t be available, so passing in the state variable as a binding value would be an alternative:
var body: some View
<main display>
.overlay(showingSheet ? Sheet1(presented: $showingSheet) : EmptyView())
You might also find that a ZStack works better than .overlay depending on what the contents of the tab view actually are.
You’ll definitely have a lot more structural work to do to make this work, but I hope you can see that it’s possible.