Elevate Your App with Flutter Toast Notifications

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Toast notifications are a simple yet effective way to provide users with brief, non-disruptive messages within your mobile app. In Flutter, creating and customizing toast notifications is straightforward, allowing you to enhance the user experience and improve app engagement.

This comprehensive guide will walk you through the steps of implementing toast notifications in your Flutter app. We’ll cover essential concepts, best practices, and real-world examples to help you create informative and visually appealing toasts.

What are Flutter Toast Notifications?

Toast notifications are brief, non-disruptive messages that appear on the screen. They offer a concise way to provide essential information to users without interrupting their app experience. Toasts automatically disappear after a specified duration, ensuring they don’t interfere with user interactions.

There are two main types of toast notifications:

  • CENTER SHORT Toast: Displays a short message centered on the screen.
  • BOTTOM LONG Toast: Displays a longer message at the bottom of the screen.

Implementing Flutter toast notifications is a simple and straightforward process!

Integrating Flutter Toast Notifications In Your App

Before we begin coding Flutter toast notifications, ensure your development environment is set up. This includes installing the Flutter SDK and your preferred IDE (VS Code, Android Studio, etc.).

An important step is to integrate the FlutterToast plugin into your Flutter project.

Adding fluttertoast Plugin To Your Project

The fluttertoast plugin provides the necessary functionality for creating toast notifications in your Flutter app. To add this plugin, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to your project: Open your Flutter project directory in your terminal or command prompt.
  2. Locate pubspec.yaml: Look for the pubspec.yaml file, which lists your project’s dependencies.
  3. Add the plugin: In the dependencies section of pubspec.yaml, add the following line:
  // Adding fluttertoast plugin to your app
    dependencies:
      flutter:
        sdk: flutter
      fluttertoast: ^8.2.2

Now, inside your Dart file, import the FlutterToast package like so:

  // Importing fluttertoast
    import 'package:fluttertoast/fluttertoast.dart';

Implementing the First Toast Notification in your Flutter app

 Let’s work through implementing a toast notification in your Flutter application step by step!

Creating a toast message in Dart

n Flutter, the entry point of your app is the main() function, which typically runs the runApp() method with a MyApp widget. The MyApp class extends StatelessWidget and returns a MaterialApp widget.

Here’s an example of how you can create a toast within the MyHomePage widget inside your MyApp class. We’ll place the toast code within the onPressed method of a FlatButton widget, which is triggered when the user taps the button.

  // void main Function
    void main() {
      runApp(MyApp());
    }
    
    class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
      @override
      Widget build(BuildContext context) {
        return MaterialApp(
          home: MyHomePage(),
        );
      }
    }
    
    class MyHomePage extends StatefulWidget {
      @override
      _MyHomePageState createState() => _MyHomePageState();
    }
    
    class _MyHomePageState extends State<MyHomePage> {
    
      @override
      Widget build(BuildContext context) {
        return Scaffold(
        appBar: AppBar(),
        body: Center(
            child: FlatButton(
            child: Text('Show Toast'),
            onPressed: () {
                Fluttertoast.showToast(
                msg: "This is a Center Short Toast",
                toastLength: Toast.LENGTH_SHORT,
                gravity: ToastGravity.CENTER,
                );
            },
            ),
        ),
        );
      }
    }

The toast.showToast() function is called on a button press. Notice how this method gives us full control over our toast message properties, such as duration (toastLength) and position (gravity).

The Power of Customisation

When using toast notifications in Flutter, developers obtain complete power over notification customization. You can change the color, size, and gravity of the toast message based on the requirements.

‍Customizing your toast notifications

Customize the showToast function to match your app’s aesthetics and purpose. Here’s an example that displays a toast with a blue background, white text, and a duration of 4 seconds, centered on the screen:

 //Cusomisation of a toast notification
    
    Fluttertoast.showToast(
        msg: "This is a Center Short Toast",
        toastLength: Toast.LENGTH_SHORT,
        gravity: ToastGravity.CENTER,
        timeInSecForIosWeb: 4, // only used in case of iOS
        backgroundColor: Colors.blue,
        textColor: Colors.white,
        fontSize: 16.0
        );

Throughout this exercise, remember, the aim is to keep toast messages useful yet non-intrusive, hence enhancing your app experience!

Conclusion

Toast notifications are a valuable tool for enhancing the user experience of your Flutter app. By following the guidelines and examples presented in this guide, you can effectively implement and customize toast notifications to provide users with relevant and timely information.

Remember to consider the appropriate context, timing, and styling for your toast notifications to ensure they are both informative and unobtrusive. With well-crafted toast notifications, you can elevate your app’s user interface and improve overall user satisfaction.

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