avocado_toast

A Flutter Plugin for generating custom Android Toasts, completely in Dart code (no channels).

Getting Started

Why Avocado Toast?

It seemed clever at the time.

What is Avocado Toast?

Avocado Toast is a Dart plugin for Flutter apps, allowing developers the opportunity to add traditional and custom toasts to their Flutter-made Android apps, using either strings or widgets. Currently, Flutter has not included a traditional toast widget to their material package.

Snackbars are Toasts in Material Design, why not just use a material snackbar?

Tradition!

Why not make a channel, and use Android's native toasts?

That's actually a really good idea. There's nothing wrong with creating a channel, especially when the widget is meant to emulate functionality only found on Android phones. However, I wanted to create something that would have a limited connection to the native later, add nothing to the dex method count, and exist in a single .dart file.

What constructors / methods / constants are in the API?

• Current features:
  • Toastable() Widget (as a body argument for a Scaffold widget), for wrapping Material child widgets, and accepts two arguments:
    • toastController parameter (mandatory), which accepts a ToastController instance (see below)
    • child parameter (mandatory), the child of the Scaffold widget, and the widget upon which one wishes to fire off a Toast
  • ToastController() constructor, which accepts a State argument as a parameter (mandatory)
  • show() method, to fire off a Toast:
    • text parameter, for passing Strings (do not use if you only want to create a custom widget)
    • widget parameter, for passing Widgets (do not use if you only want to make a classic toast)
    • toastLength parameter (mandatory), which accepts one of only two constants for duration:
      • ToastLength.SHORT - duration of 2.0 seconds
      • ToastLength.LONG - duration of 3.5 seconds
• Current limitations:
  • Should only be used with Android apps (no alert option for iOS)
  • Widget position is anchored close to the bottom of the screen (great for classic toasts, but limits placement of custom widgets, i.e. images, buttons, videos, gifs, etc.)
  • Currently queued toasts do not survive moving between routes
• Improvements planned for next release:
  • Sustain toasts between state/route changes
  • allow more positional composition for custom widgets

How do I use Avocado Toast?

First, incorporate this plugin into your Flutter project, and import the package into your app.

Next, in your PageState class for whichever page you'd like to have toasts displayed, declare and initialize your ToastController with a State instance by overriding initState(), and clean up resources by overriding dispose():

class MyHomePage extends StatefulWidget {
  MyHomePage({Key key, this.title}) : super(key: key);

  final String title;

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

class _MyHomePageState extends State<MyHomePage> {
  int _counter = 0;
  ToastController toastController;

  void _incrementCounter() {
    setState(() {
      _counter++;
    });
  }

  @override
  void initState() {
    super.initState();
    toastController = ToastController(state: this);
    }

  @override
  void dispose() {
    super.dispose();
    toastController = null;
  }
  ....
}

Then, add a Toastable() widget to the body parameter of your Scaffold() widget of your overridden build() method, passing in the ToastController to the toastController parameter, and the rest of the layout widgets to the child parmeter:

....

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text(widget.title),
      ),
      body: Toastable(
        toastController: toastController,
        child: Center(
          child: Column(
            mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
            children: <Widget>[
              Text(
                'You have pushed the button this many times:',
              ),
              Text(
                '$_counter',
                style: Theme.of(context).textTheme.display1,
              ),
            ],
          ),
        ),
      ),
      ....

Finally, call the show() method on your ToastController instance as needed, and pass in your text as a string, and the duration of the toast as either ToastLength.SHORT or ToastLength.LONG:

      ....
      
      floatingActionButton: FloatingActionButton(
        onPressed: () {
          _incrementCounter();
          toastController.show(
              text: 'Button Clicked this many times: $_counter', 
              toastLength: ToastLength.LONG);
        },
        tooltip: 'Increment',
        child: Icon(Icons.add),
      ), // This trailing comma makes auto-formatting nicer for build methods.
    );
  }
 ....

And that's it! The toast should look a little something like this:

And now for something completely meta:

A widget with an image of Avocado Toast inside an Avocado Toast Toastable() widget. You're welcome.

License

The MIT License. Now go forth and make Toasts like it's 2008.

Please see the attached LICENSE file for more information.

Download the Flutter plugin here!