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Library to create CLI wizards

Outline: #

  • An open-source tool created to make it easier for users to make command line wizards or surveys which are answer driven. The project has been published as a dart package and can be found here. Moreover, you can find an image conversion tool (PNG to JPEG and vice-versa) which has been built using this package here.
  • Details about why I created this project and how it was constructed can be found below.

Purpose: #

  • Before I began learning Flutter properly, properly here is a slightly tricky word and I mean it to be learnt how to methodically craft Flutter apps bearing in mind proper state design and architectural principles, I wanted to learn Dart at a more foundational level.
  • Although I have some degree of experience with Java, I don't have any experience using the core concepts of Object Oriented Programming in any language except Python, and Python is such that a number of the core features of OOP are absent. Therefore, I wanted to solidify my understanding of Dart, not only to be able to learn Flutter but also better understand some foundational programming concepts.
  • I completed this project as part of a Udemy course on Flutter and Dart, which I am finding an excellent resource in gaining an intermediate ability in Dart and the Flutter framework.
  • This build seemed rather simple on the surface, but having to understand how to create the tool within an OOP framework, learning about the basic file structure of a library and writing clean, reusable code made it so that the build was very engaging and its ease of use was paramount as I used it to create a file conversion tool as well.

Description: #

  • The project works through 3 main classes: Option, Terminal, Prompter, . Each of these offer different features to the final build and yet are essential to it. To fully understand the project structure, we can look at each class individually.
  • The cli_wizard_avs.dart file serves as the central interface point for the project, as demonstrated by the example in the main.dart file wherein users simply need to import this one file and no other.
  • Individual details about each of the methods and the fields lie in the dart files and the comments and an overview of the classes lie below:

Option: #

  • An instance of the option class represents each answer option that the user can select when given a choice. For example, if asked to pick a colour, there would be a list of Option objects, each representing a colour.
  • This class has two fields: label and value. The label is a String and merely reflects what is to be displayed to the user via the terminal. The value is dynamic and is what is returned after the user makes a choice. For the colours example, the label could be "I pick the colour red", while the value could simply be the hex-code of the colour.

Terminal: #

  • This class is used simply for IO purposes and therefore just prints information to the screen and returns the user's input.
  • It uses the dart:io package in order to handle the IO.
  • There is no treatment of data in this class and only stylistic changes are made to the data before displaying to the terminal and/or getting input.
  • The class employs a const constructor since it has no fields and therefore multiple instances of the class will not be useful, therefore by using a const constructor, any instances of the terminal class beyond the first instance will simply point to the same instance.

Prompter: #

  • This class levies the Terminal method in order to ask questions via its askBinary or askMultiple methods and returns the response to the user.
  • Although this class and the Terminal class could have been merged into one, they were separated to allow for a different medium for IO in the future, for example the Web.
  • The ask private method simply controls the terminal class and uses it to print a prompt and a list of Option instances to the screen, returning data to the askBinary or askMultiple methods that call it.
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Library to create CLI wizards

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