diffutil_dart 1.0.0-alpha+4

Calculate the changeset between two lists. Used for implicitly animating Flutter lists without having to maintain a StatefulWidget.

diffutil.dart

Calculate the difference between two lists.

Heavily inspired bei Android's DiffUtil class, the code was adopted for Dart.

Uses Myers algorithm internally.

What is this good for?

There are often situations, where an app displays a list of items, which are fetched from an external data source like a server endpoint or a database, and updates are not sent as delta, but as a whole new list.

It can be useful to take the old list and the new list and calculate the difference between those two, for example when animating the insertion and removal of new items in the displayed list (See diffutil_sliverlist).

This package does exactly that: It takes two lists and calculates the difference (or to be more accurate: edit script) between those two lists as list of Insert, Remove, Change and Move operations.

Usage

Calculating diffs:

Simple usage:

final diffResult = calculateListDiff([1, 2 ,3], [1, 3, 4]);

Custom equality:

final diffResult = calculateListDiff(oldList, newList, (o1, o2) => o1.id == o2.id);

If you don't want to use plain old Dart lists (for example if you're using built_value or kt.dart), and don't want to convert your custom list to standard lists, you can use the calculateDiff function and implement your own DiffDelegate easily.

Or use calculateCustomListDiff and CustomListDiffDelegate.

Move detection is disabled by default.

Using the result:

Call .getUpdates() on the diffResult to get a List of DiffUpdate objects. These are sealed classes of type Insert, Remove, Change or Move. Move operations are only calculated if calculateListDiff was called with detectMoves: true

  for (final update in diffResult.getUpdates())
    update.when(
      insert: (pos, count) => print("inserted $count on $pos"),
      remove: (pos, count) => print("removed $count on $pos"),
      change: (pos, payload) => print("changed on $pos with payload $payload"),
      move: (from, to) => print("move $from to $to"),
    );

By default, Insert and Remove Operations are batched. (e.g. multiple consecutive inserts or removes are represented by a single Insert/Remove object with a count field > 1). If you want to turn off edit script batching, call getUpdates(batch: false). This means, every Insert and Remove operation will have a count of 1 and the edit script of [] and [1, 2] will be

[Insert(position: 0, count : 1), Insert(position: 0, count :1 )]

instead of

[Insert(position: 0, count: 2)]

Using the result (legacy way)

Implement ListUpdateCallback and call diffResult.dispatchUpdatesTo(myCallback);

Performance metrics:

Same as Android's DiffUtil:

• O(N) space
• O(N + D^2) time performance where D is the length of the edit script.
• additional O(N^2) time where N is the total number of added and removed items if move detection is enabled

The edit script is the smallest set of operations needed to transform the first list into the second list.