Unlocking the Power of Flutter’s Chip Widget
When it comes to creating stunning user interfaces in Flutter, the Chip widget is a game-changer. This versatile widget allows developers to add interactive animations and customize their UI with ease. In this article, we’ll dive into the world of Chip widgets, exploring their types, properties, and how to use them to display categories.
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.
Adding and Removing Categories
To add a new category, we’ll use a TextField widget and call the addCategories function when the user submits the text. To remove a category, we’ll pass the removeCategories function to the onDeleted callback of the Chip widget.
Putting it all Together
With our Chip widgets and categories in place, we can run our application and see the result. The full code for the sample application is available here.
By mastering the Chip widget, developers can take their Flutter applications to the next level, creating stunning and interactive user interfaces with ease.