iced/examples/markdown/overview.md
2024-07-28 19:18:11 +02:00

2.7 KiB

Overview

Inspired by The Elm Architecture, Iced expects you to split user interfaces into four different concepts:

  • State — the state of your application
  • Messages — user interactions or meaningful events that you care about
  • View logic — a way to display your state as widgets that may produce messages on user interaction
  • Update logic — a way to react to messages and update your state

We can build something to see how this works! Let's say we want a simple counter that can be incremented and decremented using two buttons.

We start by modelling the state of our application:

#[derive(Default)]
struct Counter {
    value: i32,
}

Next, we need to define the possible user interactions of our counter: the button presses. These interactions are our messages:

#[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy)]
pub enum Message {
    Increment,
    Decrement,
}

Now, let's show the actual counter by putting it all together in our view logic:

use iced::widget::{button, column, text, Column};

impl Counter {
    pub fn view(&self) -> Column<Message> {
        // We use a column: a simple vertical layout
        column![
            // The increment button. We tell it to produce an
            // `Increment` message when pressed
            button("+").on_press(Message::Increment),

            // We show the value of the counter here
            text(self.value).size(50),

            // The decrement button. We tell it to produce a
            // `Decrement` message when pressed
            button("-").on_press(Message::Decrement),
        ]
    }
}

Finally, we need to be able to react to any produced messages and change our state accordingly in our update logic:

impl Counter {
    // ...

    pub fn update(&mut self, message: Message) {
        match message {
            Message::Increment => {
                self.value += 1;
            }
            Message::Decrement => {
                self.value -= 1;
            }
        }
    }
}

And that's everything! We just wrote a whole user interface. Let's run it:

fn main() -> iced::Result {
    iced::run("A cool counter", Counter::update, Counter::view)
}

Iced will automatically:

  1. Take the result of our view logic and layout its widgets.
  2. Process events from our system and produce messages for our update logic.
  3. Draw the resulting user interface.

Read the book, the documentation, and the examples to learn more!