flutter-tdd-clean-architecture-course VS json_serializable.dart

TDD in Flutter - Series on test driven development

TDD

This is inspired by ReSo Coder's Clean Architecture tutorial.

So I just finished this course on Clean-Code TDD with Flutter and I'm interested in applying some of the stuff I learned from it to my React projects. One of the neat things in the project was the injection_container.dart file. Seemed like a nice way to consolidate dependencies. Reminded me of the "barrel files" I've seen used in some other project tutorials I've done.

You are using reso's version so I will use this to demonstrate my thoughts.

If you really want to write it yourself, sure. This code is very easily automatically generated.

https://pub.dev/packages/json_serializable

Serializing and deserializing json is easy thanks to the json_serializable integration. Makes it impossible to make mistakes like you would normally when working with dynamic values and strings.

We will now create a new file called build.yaml in the failures directory and add the following code. This will change the behaviour of the json_serializable so that it generates JSON keys in snake_case.

Once the package has been created, we will install freezed for JSON serialization and value equality , as this library provides helpful tools for these tasks. We will use json_serializable for JSON serialization. To install freezed and freezed_annotation, open your terminal inside the models package and use the command:

However, we cannot do this kind of JSON de-serialization in Flutter. Without reflection, we need to consider other approaches for these same tasks. For instance, the package json_serializable uses source code generation for decorating classes with methods to serialize and de-serialize JSON strings.

We could work around having to introduce parsing logic by using a package such as json_serializable to parse data to and from JSON to save ourselves some time. However, you'd need to make sure the native platforms are returning the data in the exact format you are expecting, and vice versa. Otherwise the parsing will fail.

json_serializable - Provides Dart Build System builders for handling JSON.

The other ways involve using a package like json_serializable. They automatically generate boilerplate code to convert between your model classes and JSON. The issue is that Flutter doesn't support reflection (Dart does, but Flutter for mobile doesn't due to performance reasons) so any kind of library that generates code needs to do so statically. All packages involve annotating your classes and then running a builder script that generates the boilerplate code.