Unlocking the Power of Flutter’s Chip Widget

What is the Chip Widget?

The Chip widget is a top-level widget that provides a rounded box with text and custom interactions. It’s a popular choice for category tiles, allowing developers to customize the tile and add or remove categories smoothly.

Types of Chip Widgets

Flutter offers four types of Chip widgets:

• InputChip: Represents a complex piece of information in a compact form.
• ChoiceChip: Allows users to make a selection from a set of options.
• FilterChip: Uses tags or words to filter content.
• ActionChip: Represents an action related to the Chip’s primary purpose.

Properties of Chip Widgets

Chip widgets expose a range of properties that allow developers to customize their appearance and behavior. Some key properties include:

• label: The text displayed on the Chip.
• labelStyle: The style applied to the label.
• avatar: An icon or image displayed before the label.
• deleteIcon: The icon displayed when the Chip is deleted.
• onDeleted: The callback function called when the Chip is deleted.
• elevation: The amount of elevated height of the Chip.
• padding: The padding between the Chip’s contents and the outside.

Using Chip Widgets to Display Categories

To demonstrate the power of Chip widgets, we’ll build a sample application that displays a list of categories. We’ll use a Wrap widget to layout the Chips dynamically, and create two functions to add and remove categories.

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

class CategoryChip extends StatefulWidget {
  @override
  _CategoryChipState createState() => _CategoryChipState();
}

class _CategoryChipState extends State {
  List _categories = [];

  void _addCategory(String category) {
    setState(() {
      _categories.add(category);
    });
  }

  void _removeCategory(String category) {
    setState(() {
      _categories.remove(category);
    });
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Wrap(
      children: _categories.map((category) {
        return Chip(
          label: Text(category),
          onDeleted: () => _removeCategory(category),
        );
      }).toList(),
    );
  }
}

Adding and Removing Categories

To add a new category, we’ll use a TextField widget and call the _addCategory function when the user submits the text. To remove a category, we’ll pass the _removeCategory function to the onDeleted callback of the Chip widget.

TextField(
  onSubmitted: (text) => _addCategory(text),
)

Putting it all Together

With our Chip widgets and categories in place, we can run our application and see the result.

View the full code for the sample application

By mastering the Chip widget, developers can take their Flutter applications to the next level, creating stunning and interactive user interfaces with ease.