SwiftUI View Property willSet & didSet property observers not working

EDIT: On iOS 14 property observers work the same as they did in iOS 13. But, we now have the .onChange(of:perform:) as a replacement. Docs

Text(self.myString).onChange(of: self.myString) { newValue in print("myString changed to: \(newValue)") }

Property observers on basic vars technically work in SwiftUI. If you do something like var view = MyTestView(...) and then view.FSAC = "updated" the the observers will fire (I've verified this).

However, typically with SwiftUI you construct the View (which is a struct not a class) within body during each layout pass. In your case var body: some View { MyTestView(FSAC: "FSAC Value") }.

Property observers do not fire during init, and therefore they aren't usually useful in SwiftUI Views.

If you would like to update some sort of State during init, take a look at this answer.


Thanks to arsenius for an explanation as to why the Property Observers did not fire in this instance.

As a fix, I removed the property in the view, and replaced it with an init function with a signature which included the required data to be passed from the NavigationLink call. Within the init, I called a function on the ViewModel directly.

struct MyTestView: View {

    @ObservedObject var vm = MyTestViewModel()

    init(FSAC: String) {
        if(FSAC != "") {
            vm.SetFsac(FSAC: FSAC)
        }
    }
...