Flutter: Using Redux to manage complex forms with multiple tabs and relationships

The full code for this post can be found here.

In my last post I described how we’re using keys to manage the state of complex forms. Although the implementation works having any state outside of our main Redux store meant that persistence was incomplete. For example, if a user started to create an invoice and then closed/reopened the app before saving their work would be lost.

I had initially decided to keep some of the state separate due to the large size of our store. A user can have up to five companies linked under a single account. Each company can have thousands of clients, invoices, etc. Having to constantly write the state to disk would be CPU intensive. To solve this we’ve modified our persistence middleware to save parts of the state separately and then piece it back together when initializing the state on load.

Many of the actions in our app require persisting either data state (ie, a list of clients) or UI state (ie, the current sort field). In order to prevent having an extremely long list of actions in the reducers we’ve create two base classes PersistData and PersistUI. Actions that require either can add them as mixins. We use the same approach to track the if the app is currently loading data or not.

Here’s an example with some of the client actions.

class LoadClientRequest implements StartLoading {}

class LoadClientSuccess implements StopLoading, PersistData {
 final BuiltList<ClientEntity> clients;
 LoadClientSuccess(this.clients);
}

class LoadClientsFailure implements StopLoading {
 final dynamic error;
 LoadClientsFailure(this.error);
}

class SortClients implements PersistUI {
 final String field;
 SortClients(this.field);
}

We’re using a shell script to help quickly generate some of the boilerplate Redux code. Using the mixins has the added benefit that it requires far fewer manual adjustments to the code once it’s generated.

You can see a full example here. We’re using Redux to manage a client’s details across multiple tabs. There are a few implementation details worth pointing out.

• The code for the reducer is a bit unwieldy. In an actual app you’d most likely use built_value which provide a clean way to handle immutability.
• In order to update the TextControllers with the state from the model overriding didChangeDependencies seems to work best.

Hope you found this post useful. If you can see any ways to improve the code feedback is greatly appreciated!

Continue to part 4 >>