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Overview

Fl-Query is a asynchronous data manager for Flutter that caches, fetches, automatically refetches stale data. Basically, its Tanstack-Query (formerly React-Query) but for Flutter. But that doesn't mean it's a direct port of Tanstack-Query. Instead the concept of Tanstack-Query is implemented by Fl-Query

What does it offer?​

  • Async data caching & invalidation
  • Smart refetch in the background every time data becomes stale
  • Declarative way to define asynchronous operations
  • Code & data reusability because of persisted data & Query/Mutation Job API
  • Optimistic data support
  • Lazy Loading/Fetching support
  • Zero Configuration out of the box & never have to touch any Global Store
  • Flutter Hooks support out of the box

Why?

The hell, why?

The main purpose of Fl-Query is providing the easiest way to manage the messy server-state part requiring the least amount of code with code reusability & performance

Some Questions and their answers:

  • Isn't FutureBuilder good enough?

    Yes but it is only if your commercial server has huge load of power & you're made of money or your app is simple or mostly offline & barely requires internet connection FutureBuilder isn't good for data persistency & its impossible to share data across the entire application using it. Also if you call your fetching function directly in the build method as future: getData("random-id") it'll run every time the component rebuilds & it can be mitigated only if you call the method inside initState which involves lots of boilerplate

  • FutureProvider from riverpod or provider should be enough, right?

    Yeah, indeed its more than enough for many applications but what if your app needs Optimistic Updates & proper server-state synchronization or simply want a custom cacheTime? Although FutureProvider is a viable solution for most of the Future but still you've to manually manage the cache & it still have no support for Lazy Loading.

    Remi Rousselet's riverpod is definitely an inspiration for Fl-Query & the QueryJob & MutationJob API is actually inspired by riverpod & IMO is the best state management solution any library has ever provided but that's still a client state manager just like other client state manager or synchronous data manager