Flutter and Dart Cookbook

Chapter 13. Handling Data Assets

In this chapter, you will learn how Flutter and Dart combine to manage data resources. Over the course of the chapter, you will see how the location of the data affects the approach to accessing the required information. Throughout this chapter, follow the recipes to learn various techniques to incorporate embedded, asset-based, and remote data into your application.

So far in this book, our examples have focused on data that is included directly in the application code. When you are using embedded data in this way, much of the preparatory work will have been done for you. Over the course of this chapter, we will look at processing JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which is one of the most common formats used for ingesting data.

You will learn how to:

• Refactor data for an application

• Consume information from a local JSON file

• Work with data located in an assets folder

• Handle remote data consumption using a Future

• Automate JSON to a Dart class

We will be using two example JSON files to demonstrate how to load external data during this chapter. The format of each file is shown in the following samples:

• Sample 1: Single-layer JSON

  {
    "1": "January",
    "2": "February",
    "3": "March",
    "4": "April"
  }

• Sample 2: Multilayer JSON

  {
    "data": [
      {
        "title": "January"
      },
      {
        "title": "February"
      },
      {
        "title": "March"
      }
    ]
  }

Accessing external data is a very powerful technique to include within an application. Hopefully you will see ...