Introduction

Understanding The Core Package Of The Flutter SDK

This package provides business logic to fetch common things required for integrating Stream Chat into your application. The core package allows more customisation and hence provides business logic but no UI components. Please use the stream_chat_flutter package for the full fledged suite of UI components or stream_chat for the low-level client.

Background

In the early days of the Flutter SDK, the SDK was only split into the LLC (stream_chat) and the UI package (stream_chat_flutter). With this you could use a fully built interface with the UI package or a fully custom interface with the LLC. However, we soon recognised the need for a third intermediary package which made tasks like building and modifying a list of channels or messages easy but without the complexity of using low level components. The Core package (stream_chat_flutter_core) is a manifestation of the same idea and allows you to build an interface with Stream Chat without having to deal with low level code and architecture as well as implementing your own theme and UI effortlessly. Also, it has very few dependencies.

We will now explore the components of this intermediary package and understand how it helps you build the experience you want your users to have.

The package primarily contains three types of classes:

• Business Logic Components
• Core Components
• Core Controllers

Business Logic Components

These components allow you to have the maximum and lower-level control of the queries being executed.

In BLoCs, the basic functionalities - such as queries for messages, channels or queries - are bundled up and passed along down the tree. Using a BLoC allows you to either create your own way to fetch and build UIs or use an inbuilt Core widget to do the work such as queries, pagination, etc for you.

The BLoCs we provide are:

• ChannelsBloc
• MessageSearchBloc
• UsersBloc

Core Components

Core components usually are an easy way to fetch data associated with Stream Chat. Core components use functions exposed by the respective BLoCs (for example the ChannelListCore uses the ChannelsBloc) and use the respective controllers for various operations. Unlike heavier components from the UI package, core components are decoupled from UI and they expose builders instead to help you build a fully custom interface.

Data fetching can be controlled with the controllers of the respective core components.

• ChannelListCore (Fetch a list of channels)
• MessageListCore (Fetch a list of messages from a channel)
• MessageSearchListCore (Fetch a list of search messages)
• UserListCore (Fetch a list of users)
• StreamChatCore (This is different from the other core components - it is a version of StreamChat decoupled from theme and initialisations.)

Core Controllers

Core Controllers are supplied to respective CoreList widgets which allows reloading and pagination of data whenever needed.

Unlike the UI package, the Core package allows a fully custom user interface built with the data. This in turn provides a few challenges: we do not know implicitly when to paginate your list or reload your data.

While this is handled out of the box in the UI package since the List implementation is inbuilt, a controller needs to be used in the core package notifying the core components to reload or paginate the data existing currently. For this, each core component has a respective controller which you can use to call the specific function (reload / paginate) whenever such an event is triggered through / needed in your UI.

• ChannelListController
• MessageListController
• MessageSearchListController
• ChannelListController

This section goes into the individual core package widgets and their functional use.