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Last updated onJul 31, 2024
Last updated onJul 31, 2024
State management is a popular topic in Flutter and an essential concept you should thoroughly explore. Flutter provides many options for managing your application's states. Riverpod is one among them.
Flutter Riverpod provides a simple, efficient, and scalable solution for Flutter apps to maintain and communicate their state. Riverpod is built around the concept of providers at its heart. We may have to know about the Providers also.
This article discusses the Flutter Riverpod installation, its uses, advantages, and more.
Let's start with the Flutter state management and dive into Flutter Riverpod.
To control the state of widgets in your app, use setState() in simple apps. You might need to give more thought when developing an app idea.
Still, as the app develops, you must keep and communicate a state between several classes. You then realize that you need some state management strategy.
The ability to abstractly isolate your business logic from the app UI is crucial to using state management in Flutter. This helps prevent a few issues and keeps the codebase reasonable as it expands.
Now, let's move into Flutter Riverpod.
Flutter Riverpod is a modern, lightweight Flutter state management library. It makes managing and accessing application states as straightforward as possible while providing powerful features such as state immutability, isolation, and dependency injection.
With Flutter Riverpod, you can manage your application's state and ensure it is functioning efficiently.
To include the Riverpod package in your Flutter application, go to Pub.dev and add the flutter_riverpod package in pubspec.yaml.
1 dependencies: 2 flutter_riverpod: 3
After you've added it, run the flutter pub get into your terminal. And now you're ready to get started.
Before we get into Flutter Riverpod, we must first discuss Providers.
The provider is by far the most crucial aspect of a Riverpod. It means that when you return data from a provider, you are exposing the data and listening to its changes.
You can listen to data using several providers; you don't need to inject anything manually; the provider accomplishes that for you.
When creating a state in Riverpod, you must use Providers.
What, then, is a state?
States relate to system-specific memory, where your data is kept. When we use Riverpod to build states, it stores our data, manages data changes, and notifies the user interface (UI) of those changes.
1 final myNumberProvider = Provider<int>((ref) => 100); 2
As you can see, we've created a simple service that returns an integer value, as you might anticipate. This is the most basic sort of Provider. This service provider only permits you to read its data. It does not permit you to modify the data. Also, when creating a Provider, ensure it is tagged as 'final.'
This is Riverpod's heart; without it, no Provider can function. Essentially, we must wrap the ProviderScope with the Root widget. This returns all of the Providers defined in your application.
1 void main() { 2 3 runApp(ProviderScope(child: MyApp())); 4 5 } 6 7
In state management, there are numerous Providers. These are six different varieties, and each has a unique application.
In Riverpod, the most basic form of Provider is the ‘Provider’. It enables you to build a value that is accessible and shareable within your app.
Objects, including primitives, data models, and services, can be used as the value. When the value changes, the Provider handles its lifecycle automatically and updates dependent widgets.
StateProvider is a provider that exposes a method for changing its state. It is a simplified version of StateNotifierProvider intended to avoid creating a StateNotifier class for straightforward use cases.StateProvider exists solely to allow the User Interface to modify simple variables.
A StateNotifierProvider is a service that listens for and exposes a StateNotifier. Riverpod recommends this and StateNotifier for handling states that may change in response to user input.
1 final myValueStateNotifierProvider = StateNotifierProvider((ref) => MyValueStateNotifier()); 2
FutureProvider is the asynchronous version of Provider; in this sense, you can build a synchronous value and listen for changes to it, such as successfully retrieving it. Riverpod eliminates the redundancy of using FutureBuilder and handles the code automatically.
1 final myValueFutureProvider = FutureProvider<MyValue>((ref) => Future.value(MyValue())); 2
When you want to expose a data stream within your program, you use the StreamProvider. It enables you to design a provider that listens to a data stream and refreshes the user interface as new data becomes available.
The StreamProvider oversees the stream's lifecycle and handles stream subscriptions and cancellations automatically.
1 final myValueStreamProvider = StreamProvider<MyValue>((ref) => Stream.value(MyValue())); 2
When you want to use Flutter's built-in ChangeNotifier or a class that extends it as a state management solution, you use the ChangeNotifierProvider. It enables you to provide a ChangeNotifier object as a provider, making it simple to listen for changes and update the UI as needed.
This property, as the name implies, overrides something. What does it take place over? It overrides a Provider (Riverpod Provider) value and the previous value.
This feature is convenient when changing Provider's value outside of its scope. The Provider delivers or gives a read-only value, which implies you cannot modify the Provider's value. You can only alter the value within the Provider.
1 final indexProvider = Provider<int>((_) { 2 3 return 0; 4 }); 5 6
The value of indexProvider could only be altered within the curly brackets. However, if you absolutely want to change the value, we can use ProviderScope and the overrides property.
1 return ProviderScope( 2 3 overrides: [indexProvider.overrideWith((ref) => index)], 4 5 child: ....... 6 ) 7 8
Flutter Riverpod makes managing the application state in Flutter easier. It has a straightforward API and clear separation of concerns, making organizing, updating, and sharing states throughout your app more accessible. Flutter Riverpod allows you to minimize boilerplate code and take a more declarative approach to state management.
Flutter Riverpod optimizes and rebuilds state propagation. It tracks provider dependencies automatically and ensures that only the affected providers and UI components are rebuilt when the state changes.
This effective rebuild mechanism eliminates superfluous rebuilds, boosts performance, and lowers UI flickering.
Flutter Riverpod encourages dependency injection because it enhances code organization, testability, and modularity. Flutter Riverpod Providers allow you to inject dependencies, making it easy to manage and update dependencies throughout your app. This helps in the decoupling of components, the promotion of reusability, and the simplification of testing.
Flutter Riverpod provides dedicated testing utilities and tools to make writing unit and integration tests for your app's state management easier. For specialized testing, components can isolate, providers can override with test-specific values, and dependencies can mock.
Riverpod's testing services ensure that your state management logic is strong and dependable.
Using these advantages, Flutter Riverpod lets you create scalable, maintainable, high-performance Flutter apps. It simplifies state management, encourages best practices, and provides robust debugging and testing tools, all contributing to a better development experience.
To understand why we even need Flutter Riverpod, consider some of the most typical Provider problems that Riverpod solves:
Depending on the widget tree, the provider is an upgrade above InheritedWidget by design.
In conclusion, Flutter Riverpod is a potent state management library that makes it easier for Flutter applications to maintain their state. You can easily organize and exchange states using its intuitive API, scoped state management, and quick rebuilds.
You can manage asynchronous actions, inject dependencies, and quickly test the state management logic of your app with Riverpod.
Compared to Provider, Riverpod is a more sensible approach to fixing Flutter state management issues. It eliminates the Provider's shortcomings and enables a solid architecture for your Flutter application.
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