A mixture between dependency injection (DI) and state management, built with widgets for widgets.

It purposefully uses widgets for DI/state management instead of dart-only classes like Stream. The reason is, widgets are very simple yet robust and scalable.

By using widgets for state management, provider can guarantee:

• maintainability, through a forced uni-directional data-flow
• testability/composability, since it is always possible to mock/override a value
• robustness, as it is harder to forget to handle the update scenario of a model/widget

To read more about provider, see the documentation.

Migration from v2.0.0 to v3.0.0

• Providers can no longer be instantiated with const.
• Provider now throws if used with a Listenable/Stream. Consider using ListenableProvider/StreamProvider instead. Alternatively, this exception can be disabled by setting Provider.debugCheckInvalidValueType to null like so:

void main() {
  Provider.debugCheckInvalidValueType = null;

  runApp(MyApp());
}

• All XXProvider.value constructors now use value as parameter name.

Before:

ChangeNotifierProvider.value(notifier: myNotifier),

After:

ChangeNotifierProvider.value(value: myNotifier),

• StreamProvider's default constructor now builds a Stream instead of a StreamController. The previous behavior has been moved to the named constructor StreamProvider.controller.

Before:

StreamProvider(builder: (_) => StreamController<int>()),

After:

StreamProvider.controller(builder: (_) => StreamController<int>()),

Usage

Exposing a value

To expose a variable using provider, wrap any widget into one of the provider widgets from this package and pass it your variable. Then, all descendants of the newly added provider widget can access this variable.

A simple example would be to wrap the entire application into a Provider widget and pass it our variable:

Provider<String>.value(
  value: 'Hello World',
  child: MaterialApp(
    home: Home(),
  )
)

Alternatively, for complex objects, most providers expose a constructor that takes a function to create the value. The provider will call that function only once, when inserting the widget in the tree, and expose the result. This is perfect for exposing a complex object that never changes over time without writing a StatefulWidget.

The following creates and exposes a MyComplexClass. And in the event where Provider is removed from the widget tree, the instantiated MyComplexClass will be disposed.

Provider<MyComplexClass>(
  builder: (context) => MyComplexClass(),
  dispose: (context, value) => value.dispose()
  child: SomeWidget(),
)

Reading a value

The easiest way to read a value is by using the static method Provider.of<T>(BuildContext context). This method will look up in the widget tree starting from the widget associated with the BuildContext passed and it will return the nearest variable of type T found (or throw if nothing is found).

Combined with the first example of exposing a value, this widget will read the exposed String and render "Hello World."

class Home extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Text(
      /// Don't forget to pass the type of the object you want to obtain to `Provider.of`!
      Provider.of<String>(context)
    );
  }
}

Alternatively instead of using Provider.of, we can use the Consumer widget.

This can be useful for performance optimizations or when it is difficult to obtain a BuildContext descendant of the provider.

Provider<String>.value(
  value: 'Hello World',
  child: Consumer<String>(
    builder: (context, value, child) => Text(value),
  ),
);

The widget Consumer can also be used inside MultiProvider. To do so, it must return the child passed to builder in the widget tree it creates.

MultiProvider(
  providers: [
    Provider(builder: (_) => Foo()),
    Consumer<Foo>(
      builder: (context, foo, child) =>
        Provider.value(value: foo.bar, child: child),
    )
  ],
);

---

Note that you can freely use multiple providers with different types together:

Provider<int>.value(
  value: 42,
  child: Provider<String>.value(
    value: 'Hello World',
    child: // ...
  )
)

And obtain their value independently:

var value = Provider.of<int>(context);
var value2 = Provider.of<String>(context);

MultiProvider

When injecting many values in big applications, Provider can rapidly become pretty nested:

Provider<Foo>.value(
  value: foo,
  child: Provider<Bar>.value(
    value: bar,
    child: Provider<Baz>.value(
      value: baz,
      child: someWidget,
    )
  )
)

In that situation, we can use MultiProvider to improve the readability:

MultiProvider(
  providers: [
    Provider<Foo>.value(value: foo),
    Provider<Bar>.value(value: bar),
    Provider<Baz>.value(value: baz),
  ],
  child: someWidget,
)

The behavior of both examples is strictly the same. MultiProvider only changes the appearance of the code.

ProxyProvider

Since the 3.0.0, there is a new kind of provider: ProxyProvider.

ProxyProvider is a provider that combines multiple values from other providers into a new object, and sends the result to Provider.

That new object will then be updated whenever one of the providers it depends on updates.

The following example uses ProxyProvider to build translations based on a counter coming from another provider.

Widget build(BuildContext context) {
  return MultiProvider(
    providers: [
      ChangeNotifierProvider(builder: (_) => Counter()),
      ProxyProvider<Counter, Translations>(
        builder: (_, counter, __) => Translations(counter.value),
      ),
    ],
    child: Foo(),
  );
}

class Translations {
  const Translations(this._value);

  final int _value;

  String get title => 'You clicked $_value times';
}

It comes under multiple variations, such as:

• ProxyProvider vs ProxyProvider2 vs ProxyProvider3, ...

  That digit after the class name is the number of other providers that ProxyProvider depends on.

• ProxyProvider vs ChangeNotifierProxyProvider vs ListenableProxyProvider, ...

  They all work similarly, but instead of sending the result into a Provider, a ChangeNotifierProxyProvider will send its value to a ChangeNotifierProvider.

Existing providers

provider exposes a few different kinds of "provider" for different types of objects.

The complete list of all the objects availables is here

name	description
Provider	The most basic form of provider. It takes a value and exposes it, whatever the value is.
ListenableProvider	A specific provider for Listenable object. ListenableProvider will listen to the object and ask widgets which depend on it to rebuild whenever the listener is called.
ChangeNotifierProvider	A specification of ListenableProvider for ChangeNotifier. It will automatically call ChangeNotifier.dispose when needed.
ValueListenableProvider	Listen to a ValueListenable and only expose ValueListenable.value.
StreamProvider	Listen to a Stream and expose the latest value emitted.
FutureProvider	Takes a Future and updates dependents when the future completes.