isolate_handler 0.1.2+hotfix1

Effortless isolates abstraction layer with support for MethodChannel calls.

Isolate Handler

Effortless isolates abstraction layer with support* for MethodChannel calls.

Getting Started

Be aware of limitations

Accessing MethodChannels from isolates using this package should not be done in a production environment, at least not without full understanding of the limitations. Please read the section titled Limitations first.

What's an isolate?

In the words of the Dart documentation itself, isolates are:

Independent workers that are similar to threads but don't share memory, communicating only via messages.

In short, Dart is a single-threaded language, but it has support for concurrent execution of code through these so-called isolates.

This means that you can use isolates to execute code you want to run alongside your main thread, which is particularly useful for keeping your Flutter application running smoothly.

For more detailed information, please read this excellent article by Didier Boelens.

Why should I use Isolate Handler?

Short answer: access* to MethodChannel calls from within isolates in Flutter.

(* Be aware of the limitations.)

Dart already has a very clean interface for spawning and interacting with isolates, using Isolate Handler instead of the regular interface provides only a slightly simpler way of communicating with isolates.

Aside from that and access to isolates through names, the real motivation behind this package was to support access to native code from within an isolate when using as part of Flutter on a mobile device.

Isolate Handler makes this relatively seamless, only requiring a list of channels be provided.

Using Isolate Handler

Spawning an isolate

Spawning an isolate with Isolate Handler is really simple:

IsolateHandler().spawn(entryPoint);

This is similar to how isolates are spawned normally, with the exception that Isolate Handler does not expect a message parameter, only an entry point. Messaging has been abstracted away and a communications channel is instead opened automatically.

Communicating with an isolate

Just spawning an isolate provides no benefit over simply using Isolate.spawn, so let's move on to a slightly more useful example; sending data to isolate and receiving some back.

Let's do a complete project where we start an isolate and send it an integer, have it add one to our count and return the value. We will also give our isolate a name to make it easy to access from anywhere.

final isolates = IsolateHandler();
int counter = 0;

void main() {
  // Start the isolate at the `entryPoint` function.
  isolates.spawn<int>(entryPoint,
    name: "counter",
    // Executed every time data is received from the spawned isolate.
    onReceive: setCounter,
    // Executed once when spawned isolate is ready for communication.
    onInitialized: () => isolates.send(counter, to: "counter")
  );
}

// Set new count and display current count.
void setCounter(int count) {
  counter = count;
  print("Counter is now $counter");
  
  // We will no longer be needing the isolate, let's dispose of it.
  isolates.kill("counter");
}

// This function happens in the isolate.
void entryPoint(HandledIsolateContext context) {
  // Calling initialize from the entry point with the context is
  // required if communication is desired. It returns a messenger which
  // allows listening and sending information to the main isolate.
  final messenger = HandledIsolate.initialize(context);

  // Triggered every time data is received from the main isolate.
  messenger.listen((count) {
    // Add one to the count and send the new value back to the main
    // isolate.
    messenger.send(++count);
  });
}

Call to invokeMethod from isolate

Now that we know how to use Isolate Handler to create and communicate with isolates, let's take a look at how to use it for its main purpose; accessing native calls from within the isolate.

We will modify the code from our previous example a little bit to make it request the new count from native instead of just adding one by itself:

final isolates = IsolateHandler();
int counter = 0;

// Let's store our channels in a top-level Map for convenience.
const Map<String, MethodChannel> channels = {
  'counter': const MethodChannel('isolates.example/counter'),
};

void main() {
  // Start the isolate at the `entryPoint` function.
  isolates.spawn<int>(entryPoint,
    name: "counter",
    // Executed every time data is received from the spawned isolate.
    onReceive: setCounter,
    // Executed once when spawned isolate is ready for communication.
    onInitialized: () => isolates.send(counter, to: "counter"),
    // Let's tell isolate handler we might end up calling any of the
    // channels in the map.
    channels: channels.values.toList()
  );
}

// Set new count and display current count.
void setCounter(int count) {
  counter = count;
  print("Counter is now $counter");
  
  // We will no longer be needing the isolate, let's dispose of it.
  isolates.kill("counter");
}

// This function happens in the isolate.
void entryPoint(HandledIsolateContext context) {
  // Calling initialize from the entry point with the context is
  // required if communication is desired. It returns a messenger which
  // allows listening and sending information to the main isolate.
  final messenger = HandledIsolate.initialize(context);

  // Triggered every time data is received from the main isolate. We can
  // now ignore incoming data as count is kept on the native side.
  messenger.listen((data) async {
    final int result = await channels['counter'].invokeMethod('getNewCount');
    messenger.send(result);
  });
}

That's it. The only real change that happened is that we supplied our Isolate Handler with a list of channels we might need to invoke a method on and we also added an invokeMethod call inside our isolate.

Limitations

• Isolate Handler accesses Flutter's platform thread, as such plugins doing heavy lifting will still cause the UI to be locked up. Only Dart code is executed in the isolate—the plugin must spawn its own native thread to run in.

• Isolate Handler uses a workaround for MethodChannel support because there is no proper way of supporting them. The workaround works well for simple applications, but may become unpredictable in more complex scenarios.

• At the moment only MethodChannel is supported, EventChannel streams are not. Support for them may not be possible to add due to the fact that Flutter sets its own custom handler to deal with them.

• Isolate Handler uses setMockMessageHandler to intercept calls. As there can only be one mock message handler active at any given time, another may not be set within the isolate for the one of the registered channels.

• Custom message handlers and codecs are also not supported at the time.

Bugs

• Race condition where if two MethodChannels belonging to the same isolate request data at the same time, results may be sent to the wrong MethodChannel.