The pull-to-refresh pattern lets a user pull down on a list of data using touch in order to retrieve more data. The "Pull-to-refresh" gesture was first introduced by Loren Brichter in the Tweetie app and in no time it became so popular that countless apps adopted this gesture. Today “pull-to-refresh” feature is a natural part of many popular apps, including Twitter, Gmail, Tweetbot, and others.
What you’ll build?
In this tutorial, you’ll build a mobile app featuring a PullToRefresh gesture using the Flutter SDK. Your app will:
Display a dynamic list with a random number of items
Each time you PullToRefresh the no of items will change in the list
This tutorial focuses on adding a PullToRefresh gesture to a Flutter app. Non-relevant concepts and code blocks are glossed over and are provided for you to simply copy and paste.
Github Repository | shyvum
Widget In Focus | RefreshIndicator
Setting up Flutter on your machine
The detailed steps to install Flutter on your personal computer & getting started with Flutter is available in the following blog
Component Syntax
The basic format of PullToRefresh gesture looks like the one below:
Implementation
The most generic way to implement PullToRefresh is as follows:
Importing dart libraries to main.dart file
Import dart:async & dart:math libraries to your main.dart file by adding the following line at the starting of the file:
Putting Code in action
Amend your main.dart file as per the following code:
Building & running the application
Connect your Emulator or physical Android device to test the application.
Click on Build & Run.
And Boooom 🧨, your app is ready. The final build would look like the below illustration.