Flutter State Management
D. Gichuki,
State
• We know that in Flutter, everything is a widget.
• The widget can be classified into two categories,
one is a Stateless widget, and another is a Stateful
widget.
• The Stateless widget does not have any internal
state. It means once it is built, we cannot change or
modify it until they are initialized again.
• On the other hand, a Stateful widget is dynamic and
has a state. It means we can modify it easily
throughout its lifecycle without reinitialized it again.
State
• A state is information that can be read when the
widget is built and might change or modified
over a lifetime of the app.
• If you want to change your widget, you need to
update the state object, which can be done by
using the setState() function available for
Stateful widgets.
• The setState() function allows us to set the
properties of the state object that triggers a
redraw of the UI.
State
• The state management is one of the most popular
and necessary processes in the lifecycle of an
application.
• According to official documentation, Flutter is
declarative. It means Flutter builds its UI by
reflecting the current state of your app.
• The following figure explains it more clearly where
you can build a UI from the application state.
State
• Let us take a simple example to understand the concept
of state management. Suppose you have created a list of
customers or products in your app.
• Now, assume you have added a new customer or product
dynamically in that list. Then, there is a need to refresh the
list to view the newly added item into the record.
• Thus, whenever you add a new item, you need to refresh
the list. This type of programming requires state
management to handle such a situation to improve
performance.
• It is because every time you make a change or update the
same, the state gets refreshed.
State
• In Flutter, the state management categorizes
into two conceptual types, which are given
below:
– Ephemeral State
– App State
Ephemeral State
• This state is also known as UI State or local
state.
• It is a type of state which is related to the
specific widget, or you can say that it is a state
that contains in a single widget.
• In this kind of state, you do not need to use
state management techniques.
• The common example of this state is Text Field.
Example
• In the above example, the _name is an
ephemeral state. Here, only the setState()
function inside the StatefulWidget's class can
access the _name.
• The build method calls a setState() function,
which does the modification in the state
variables.
• When this method is executed, the widget
object is replaced with the new one, which gives
the modified variable value.
app State
• It is different from the ephemeral state. It is a type
of state that we want to share across various parts
of our app and want to keep between user sessions.
• Thus, this type of state can be used globally.
Sometimes it is also known as application state or
shared state.
• Some of the examples of this state are User
preferences, Login info, notifications in a social
networking app, the shopping cart in an e-commerce
app, read/unread state of articles in a news app, etc.
States
States
• The simplest example of app state management
can be learned by using the provider package.
• The state management with the provider is easy to
understand and requires less coding.
• A provider is a third-party library. Here, we need to
understand three main concepts to use this library.
– ChangeNotifier
– ChangeNotifierProvider
– Consumer
ChangeNotifier
• ChangeNotifier is a simple class, which provides
change notification to its listeners.
• It is easy to understand, implement, and
optimized for a small number of listeners.
• It is used for the listener to observe a model for
changes.
• In this, we only use the notifyListener() method
to inform the listeners.
• Example.
