How to Use ProxyProvider with Flutter

In this article we're going to look at how to use ProxyProvider to inject data into other providers. This is useful if we're wanting to inject an auth token or other piece of dynamic data into another Provider at some point in the future.

The ProxyProvider has an update method which is called whenever one of its dependencies has updated. We'll see this in action in our example application by passing a GreetingService a UserService which is able to provide the current user.

Here's an example:

Project Setup

Let's create a new Flutter project in the terminal:



# New Flutter project
$ flutter create proxyprovider

# Open in VS Code
$ cd proxyprovider && code .

We'll then need to add the provider dependency to our pubspec.yaml:



dependencies:
  flutter:
    sdk: flutter

  provider: ^4.0.5

That's all the packages we need. You can now open the project up on the platform of your choice.

Login

The first thing we'll do is create our LoginForm. In our example we're using it to gather a username to be greeted on the HomePage:



///lib/presentation/widgets/login_form.dart
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/domain/entities/user.dart';

class LoginForm extends StatefulWidget {
  final Function(User) onFormSaved;

  const LoginForm({Key key, @required this.onFormSaved}) : super(key: key);

  @override
  _LoginFormState createState() => _LoginFormState();
}

class _LoginFormState extends State<LoginForm> {
  bool _autoValidate;

  GlobalKey<FormState> _formKey;

  TextEditingController _usernameTextEditingController;
  TextEditingController _passwordTextEditingController;

  @override
  void initState() {
    super.initState();

    _autoValidate = false;

    _formKey = GlobalKey<FormState>();

    _usernameTextEditingController = TextEditingController();
    _passwordTextEditingController = TextEditingController();
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Form(
      key: _formKey,
      autovalidate: _autoValidate,
      child: Column(
        children: [
          TextFormField(
              controller: _usernameTextEditingController,
              decoration: InputDecoration(labelText: "Username"),
              validator: (String value) =>
                  _validateFormField(value, "Username")),
          TextFormField(
              controller: _passwordTextEditingController,
              obscureText: true,
              decoration: InputDecoration(labelText: "Password"),
              validator: (String value) =>
                  _validateFormField(value, "Password")),
          FlatButton(
            onPressed: _onLoginPressed,
            child: Text("Login"),
          )
        ],
      ),
    );
  }

  _onLoginPressed() {
    setState(() {
      _autoValidate = true;
    });

    if (_formKey.currentState.validate()) {
      widget.onFormSaved(
        User(
          username: _usernameTextEditingController.text,
        ),
      );
    }
  }

  String _validateFormField(String value, String fieldName) {
    if (value.isEmpty) {
      return "$fieldName cannot be empty.";
    }

    return null;
  }

  @override
  void dispose() {
    _usernameTextEditingController.dispose();
    _passwordTextEditingController.dispose();

    super.dispose();
  }
}

Our User entity will be extremely bare. It'll have one property - username:



///lib/domain/entities/user.dart
import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';

class User {
  final String username;

  User({@required this.username});
}

We can then create our LoginPage which will use the LoginForm:



///lib/presentation/pages/login_page.dart
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:provider/provider.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/application/services/user_service.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/domain/entities/user.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/presentation/pages/home_page.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/presentation/widgets/login_form.dart';

class LoginPage extends StatelessWidget {
  static Route<dynamic> route() => MaterialPageRoute(
        builder: (BuildContext context) => LoginPage(),
      );

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text("Login"),
      ),
      body: Padding(
        padding: const EdgeInsets.all(16.0),
        child: Column(
          mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
          children: <Widget>[
            LoginForm(
              onFormSaved: (User user) => _onFormSaved(context, user),
            ),
          ],
        ),
      ),
    );
  }

  _onFormSaved(BuildContext context, User user) {
    Provider.of<UserService>(context, listen: false).setUser(user);
    Navigator.of(context).pushReplacement(HomePage.route());
  }
}

A review of what we've got so far:

We've got the ability to capture a User object from our LoginForm
Our LoginPage shows the form, and when the onFormSaved callback is fired we're calling UserService.setUser(user) and navigating to the HomePage.

Services

We haven't created the UserService or the HomePage to support this use case. Let's do that now:

UserService

Our UserService will be a simple class that is able to set and get the current user:



///lib/application/services/user_service.dart
import 'package:proxyprovider/domain/entities/user.dart';

class UserService {
  User _user;
  User get user => _user;

  setUser(User user) {
    _user = user;
  }
}

We can update main.dart to add our UserService as a Provider:



import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:provider/provider.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/application/services/user_service.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/presentation/pages/login_page.dart';

void main() {
  runApp(MyApp());
}

class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return MultiProvider(
      providers: [
        Provider(
          create: (_) => UserService(),
        ),
      ],
      child: MaterialApp(
        title: 'ProxyProvider',
        debugShowCheckedModeBanner: false,
        theme: ThemeData(
          brightness: Brightness.dark,
          visualDensity: VisualDensity.adaptivePlatformDensity,
        ),
        home: LoginPage(),
      ),
    );
  }
}

GreetingService

Our GreetingService will take a UserService in as a parameter and we'll use ProxyProvider to inject this with the latest value from our UserService:



///lib/application/services/greeting_service.dart
import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/application/services/user_service.dart';

class GreetingService {
  GreetingService({@required UserService userService})
      : _userService = userService;

  UserService _userService;

  String get greeting => "Hello, ${_userService.user.username}";
}

ProxyProvider

Now that we've got both our services, we can update our providers list inside of main.dart to return the GreetingService as a Provider with the latest value from UserService:



MultiProvider(
  providers: [
    Provider(
      create: (_) => UserService(),
    ),
    ProxyProvider<UserService, GreetingService>(
      update: (BuildContext context, UserService userService,
              GreetingService greetingService) =>
          GreetingService(userService: userService),
    ),
  ],
 //

This means that we're now able to access the value of GreetingService as a Provider and we can be assured that any time our UserService updates, our GreetingService will be updated to match.

We can see this in our HomePage:



///lib/presentation/pages/home_page.dart
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:provider/provider.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/application/services/greeting_service.dart';

class HomePage extends StatelessWidget {
  static Route<dynamic> route() => MaterialPageRoute(
        builder: (BuildContext context) => HomePage(),
      );

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text("Home Page"),
      ),
      body: Center(
        child: Text(
          Provider.of<GreetingService>(context).greeting,
        ),
      ),
    );
  }
}

Whatever we typed inside of our LoginForm as a username will now appear in the Center of our HomePage:

Multiple Injections

What if we have more than one item that we want to inject as a ProxyProvider? As of now we're only injecting the UserService, but there may be times when we want to add more than one object.

For this we have to do the same as before, but use ProxyProvider2, ProxyProvider2, ProxyProvider3, and so on.

Here's an example of how this may look with the use of ProxyProvider2:



MultiProvider(
  providers: [
    Provider(
      create: (_) => UserService(),
    ),
    ProxyProvider<UserService, GreetingService>(
      update: (BuildContext context, UserService userService,
              GreetingService greetingService) =>
          GreetingService(userService: userService),
    ),
    ProxyProvider2<UserService, GreetingService, CartService>(
      update: (BuildContext context, UserService userService,
              GreetingService greetingService, CartService cartService) =>
          CartService(
        userService: userService,
        greetingService: greetingService,
      ),
    ),
  ],

Our CartService does nothing interesting:



import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/application/services/greeting_service.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/application/services/user_service.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/domain/entities/user.dart';

class CartService {
  CartService({
    @required GreetingService greetingService,
    @required UserService userService,
  }) : _greetingService = greetingService,
        _userService = userService;

  GreetingService _greetingService;
  UserService _userService;

  String get cartGreeting => _greetingService.greeting;
  User get user => _userService.user;
}

If we were to update our HomePage to instead use our CartService, it'd look like this:



///lib/presentation/pages/home_page.dart
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:provider/provider.dart';
import 'package:proxyprovider/application/services/cart_service.dart';

class HomePage extends StatelessWidget {
  static Route<dynamic> route() => MaterialPageRoute(
        builder: (BuildContext context) => HomePage(),
      );

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text("Home Page"),
      ),
      body: Center(
        child: Column(
          mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
          children: <Widget>[
            Text(
              Provider.of<CartService>(context).user.username,
            ),
            Text(
              Provider.of<CartService>(context).cartGreeting,
            ),
          ],
        ),
      ),
    );
  }
}

Summary

In this article we looked at how to get started with ProxyProvider to inject values that can be provided across our widget tree. I hope you found it useful!

I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!

Code for this article: https://github.com/PaulHalliday/flutter_proxyprovider