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George Ikwegbu Chinedu
George Ikwegbu Chinedu

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Intuitive Flutter Codebase

I'd have to first of all start by saying, there's no perfect 
approach to having the best Flutter codebase. Phew!!!, with that 
out of the way, here's a less complicated and easy to use approach 
to structuring your Flutter Codebase.
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Table Of Contents

✨ What is Flutter?

Flutter is Google's UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single codebase. Click here, to know more about Flutter.

🎆 What is VsCode?

Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. Click here, to know more about VsCode.

😎 Installing Dart Extension

Before getting started with Fluuter in VsCode, you would have to first of all install the Dart extension, which will allow you work with Flutter seamlessly in your VsCode. To do so, follow the below instructions, and also use the Image below as a guide.

...
1. In your VsCode, click on the 'double-file-like' icon, to 
   reveal your side bar.
2. Select the 'Square-like' icon, that has it's first quadrant 
   apart to open your 'Extension market' or click 'Ctrl+shift+X'.
3. On the search bar, enter Dart, select the first extension that 
   pops up, and install.
4. Since I have already installed mine, it's showing 'Uninstall',       
   but yours (if you haven't installed it yet), will have the 
   'install' text instead.
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VsCode Image Guide On the installations

🎈 Create a New Flutter App

Visit the Flutter official page, to learn how to create a new 
application, as that is not our major concern in this article.
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A GIF file of excitment

🎇 Structuring the Folders

Having created the project, you'd be greeted with the usual 'starter app' flutter provides. This would serve as a boilerplate. Congratulations on that.

Structuring the Flutter Codebase

From the above image, you'd noticed I numbered the structures. Those numbers corresponds to these below explanations

...

  1. Components
    This is found at the level of the main.dart file, which
    provides necessary re-usable components that should be
    universally available anywhere in the application, e.g, the
    likes of action button, etc.

  2. Model
    This controls the structure of data you wish to use. For
    instance, say you want to create a blog post, the title, name
    of author, content, created_at, updated_at, etc, would form
    the model of the blog.dart class.

  3. Providers
    If you are using the flutter provider package, this would
    enable you split your provider helpers.

  4. Screens
    This literally means the pages of your application.

  5. Home_screen
    Lifting just the 'home_screen' as an example, it's cleaner to
    have a folder of each screen/page you wish to implement, this
    gives you the access to have other elements within the
    home_screen file.

  6. Components
    This components, does the same this as the No.1, but it's
    access is only limited to the particular screen you're working
    on. You could see the 'body.dart', which would literally
    contain the body of the scaffold in the home_screen.dart.

  7. Enums
    In flutter/dart, enums, would help you establish small set of
    predefined set of values that will be used across the
    application logic.

  8. SizeConfig
    This comes in handy, when you wish to outline sets of
    functions, that would help calculate and return, on the fly,
    the width and height of the device you're currently working
    on.

  9. Theme
    This works like the themeData in the scaffold. Here you get to
    declare some variables and User Interface settings. Some call
    it constants.

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🎉 Importance of Using this Approach

Like I earlier stated, there's no perfect way to structure your codebase, but try as much as possible to split your codes into an organized component. That way, one can easily understand your code, and would only make reference to the section at a time to fully grasp what you are writing on.

I actually stumbled upon this pattern after months of having my codebase look messy, and coming from Vue.js, my codebase is a lot cleaner than what I had in Flutter.

But after watching Abu Anwar speed codes, I fell inlove with this approach, and decided to write an article on it. Please do well to check out his Repository, you'd definately learn more.

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