flutter_cached 4.2.6

🧾 Flutter widget allowing cache-based data display featuring swipe-to-refresh and an error banner.

When building an app that caches data, there are many special cases to think about.

For example, according to the Material Design guidelines, you need to worry about displaying offline data, handling swipe to refresh, showing error banners and displaying empty states.

This package aims to make implementing cached Flutter apps as easy as possible.

Usually, the frontend asks the backend to fetch data and the backend then offers a continuous Stream of data to your frontend. When listening to bare-bone streams in Dart, you usually have to work with AsyncSnapshots quite often.

This package offers a new, augmented type of communication path between backend and frontend designed around the providing of cached data.

+----------+                             +----+
| business +-----------------+  updates  | UI |
| logic    | CacheController |==========>|    |
|          |                 |<==========|    |
|          +-----------------+  fetch()  |    |
|          |                             |    |
|          +-----------------+  updates  |    |
|          | CacheController |==========>|    |
|          |                 |<==========|    |
|          +-----------------+  fetch()  |    |
+----------+                             +----+

The communication: CacheUpdate

This type provides not only data or an error (like a normal AsyncSnapshot), but also contains information about whether data is still being fetched. Also, every error is accompanied by a stack trace.

For comparison, here are the possible states of the AsyncSnapshot:

	no data	has data
no error	nothing	with data
has error	with error	-

Here are the possible states of a CacheUpdate:

		no data	has data
fetching	no error	loading	cached
fetching	has error	-	-
not fetching	no error	initial	success
not fetching	has error	error	error but cache

Now that looks like an upgraded version of AsyncSnapshot!

The data layer

CacheControllers glue together the logic for fetching data with the UI. You can call fetch on these controllers to fetch data. And you can call updates to get a stream of CacheUpdates.

There are currently two types of CacheControllers:

• The SimpleCacheController accepts three functions: fetcher, saveToCacheand loadFromCache. When fetch is called, it simultaneously calls the fetcher and the loadFromCache function. If loadFromCache returns first, it sends out a CacheUpdate containing the cached data. When finally the fetcher returns, it sends out another CacheUpdate containing the actual data. It also passes the data to saveToCache.
• The PaginatedCacheController is a CacheController specific to Lists of items. It works just like the SimpleCacheController except that the fetcher returns both a list of items as well as a PaginationState (this can be any class that implements isDone).
  Next to the fetch method, the PaginatedCacheController also has a fetchMore method, which calls the fetcher again, passing in the last state it returned.
  By saving the offset or a pagination token or something similar in the PaginationState, it's quite easy for clients to implement pagination.

Here's an example of how each of these controllers work:

// A simple controller asking the International Chuck Norris Database for
// jokes. The second fetch call causes a joke to be immediately printed.
// (Although this is not that great of an example, because the jokes are
// non-deterministic.)
final controller = SimpleCacheController<String>(
  fetcher: () async {
    final response = http.get('http://api.icndb.com/jokes/random/');
    return json.decode(response)['value']['joke'];
  },
  saveToCache: (joke) async {
    await File('cache.txt').writeAsString(joke);
  },
  loadFromCache: () async {
    return await File('cache.txt').readAsString();
  },
);

controller.updates.forEach(print);

await controller.fetch();
await controller.fetch();

class MyPaginationState implements PaginationState {
  MyPaginationState({this.offset, this.isDone});
  
  final int offset;
  final bool isDone;
}

// A paginated controller that requests an API with an increasing offset.
final controller = PaginatedCacheController<String, int>(
  fetcher: (state) async {
    final response = json.decode(http.get('…?offset=${state.offset}')).
    final items = response['items'].cast<String>().toList();

    return PaginationResponse(
      items: items,
      state: MyPaginationState(
        offset: state.offset + items.length,
        isDone: items.isEmpty,
      ),
    );
  },
  saveToCache: (data) => …;
  loadFromCache: () => …,
);

controller.updates.forEach(print);

// Fetches data and some more data.
await controller.fetch();
await controller.fetchMore();
await controller.fetchMore();

// Re-fetches data. Displays the cached data as long as the Future is still
// loading.
await controller.fetch();
await controller.fetchMore();

The UI layer

CachedRawBuilder

Because parsing Stream<CacheUpdate<T>> is tedious, there's an equivalent to Flutter's built-in StreamBuilder that makes reacting to CacheUpdates easy:

CachedRawBuilder(
  controller: controller,
  builder: (context, update) {
    return Container(color: update.hasData ? Colors.green : Colors.red);
  },
),

CachedBuilder

Often, CacheUpdates are handled similarly. The CachedBuilder provides several builder for special cases:

// The CachedBuilder supports pull-to-refresh out of the box.
CachedBuilder(
  controller: controller,
  loadingScreenBuilder: (context) => …,
  // When an error occurs during fetching but there is cached data, the data is
  // still shown but an error banner is displayed at the top.
  errorBannerBuilder: (context, error, stackTrace) => …,
  // When there's no cached data and an errors occurs, it's shown in
  // full-screen.
  errorScreenBuilder: (context, error, stackTrace) => …,
  // There is data to show (either cached data or live data).
  builder: (context, data) {
      return Center(child: Text(data));
  },
),

Note: By default, the CachedBuilder assumes that the builder returns a scrollable widget, like a ListView or GridView. If that's not the case, you need to set hasScrollBody to false in order for the swipe to refresh to work.

PaginatedListView

Quite often, the cached data is a paginated list. This view takes care of loading more items.

And that's it! More description coming soon!