State Management

• Introduction
• When to Use State Management
• Lifecycle
• Basics
  • Updating a State
• Building Your First Widget

Introduction

In Nylo 5, you can build Widgets that use State Management.

In this section, we will learn about the NyState class, we'll also dive into some examples.

Let's first understand State Management

Everything in Flutter is a widget, they are just tiny chunks of UI that you can combine to make a complete app.

When you start building complex pages, you will need to manage the state of your widgets. This means when something changes, e.g. data, you can update that widget without having to rebuild the entire page.

There are a lot of reasons why this is important, but the main reason is performance. If you have a widget that is constantly changing, you don't want to rebuild the entire page every time it changes.

This is where State Management comes in, it allows you to manage the state of a widget in your application.

When to Use State Management

You should use State Management when you have a widget that needs to be updated without rebuilding the entire page.

For example, let's imagine you have created an ecommerce app. You have built a widget to display the total amount of items in the users' cart. Let's call this widget Cart().

A state managed Cart widget in Nylo would look something like this.

/// The Cart widget
class Cart extends StatefulWidget {
  
  Cart({Key? key}) : super(key: key);
  
  static String state = "cart";

  @override
  _CartState createState() => _CartState();
}

/// The state class for the Cart widget
class _CartState extends NyState<Cart> {

  String? _cartValue;

  _CartState() {
    stateName = Cart.state;
  }

  @override
  boot() async {
    _cartValue = await getCartValue();
  }
  
  @override
  void stateUpdated(data) {
    reboot(); // Reboot the widget
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return afterLoad(child: () => Badge(
      child: Icon(Icons.shopping_cart),
      label: Text(_cartValue ?? "1"),
    ));
  }
}

/// Get the cart value from storage
Future<String?> getCartValue() async {
  return (await NyStorage.read<String>(StorageKey.cart));
}

/// Set the cart value
Future setCartValue(int value) async {
    await NyStorage.store(StorageKey.cart, value.toString());
    updateState(Cart.state);
}

Let's break this down.

1. The Cart widget is a StatefulWidget.

2. _CartState extends NyState<Cart>.

3. You need to define a name for the state, this is used to identify the state.

4. The boot() method is called when the widget is first loaded.

5. The stateUpdate() methods handle what happens when the state is updated.

If you want to try this example in your Nylo project, create a new widget called Cart.

dart run nylo_framework:main make:stateful_widget cart

Then you can copy the example above and try it in your project.

Now, to update the cart, you can call the following.

_updateCart() async {
  String count = (await getCartValue() ?? "1");
  String countIncremented = (int.parse(count) + 1).toString();

  await NyStorage.store(StorageKey.cart, countIncremented);

  updateState(Cart.state);
}

Lifecycle

The lifecycle of a NyState widget is as follows:

1. init() - This method is called when the state is initialized.

2. stateUpdated(data) - This method is called when the state is updated.

   If you call updateState(MyStateName.state, data: "The Data"), it will trigger stateUpdated(data) to be called.

Once the state is first initialized, you will need to implement how you want to manage the state.

Updating a State

You can update a state by calling the updateState() method.

updateState(MyStateName.state);

// or with data
updateState(MyStateName.state, data: "The Data");

This can be called anywhere in your application.

Building Your First Widget

In your Nylo project, run the following command to create a new widget.

dart run nylo_framework:main make:stateful_widget todo_list

This will create a new NyState widget called TodoList.

Note: The new widget will be created in the lib/resources/widgets/ directory.