Flutter package class file visibility in project

smolikja
September 30, 2024
156 views
0 votes
2 Answers

I have created a Flutter package and I am using it in my Flutter project.

The package has a class FirebaseAuthFlowState located in ...core/firebase_auth_flow_state.dart. A package’s "root" file with an export is located right in a lib directory and exports FirebaseAuthFlowState.

When I am going to use the class FirebaseAuthFlowState in my Flutter project, my IDE (VS Code) whispers me two possible imports, both works:

package:firebase_auth_flow/core/firebase_auth_flow_state.dart
package:firebase_auth_flow/firebase_auth_flow.dart

My firebase_auth_flow.dart file

library firebase_auth_flow;

export 'package:firebase_auth_flow/core/firebase_auth_flow_state.dart'
    show FirebaseAuthFlowState;

I expect only package:firebase_auth_flow/firebase_auth_flow.dart import possible.
I expect no ...core/firebase_auth_flow_state.dart visible from the Flutter project.

Answers

- Ivo
- September 30, 2024 at 10:57 am
- 0 votes
0
I’m not entirely sure, but I believe you should put files in lib/src/ or a subdirectory of it to exclude them from the import suggestions.

The way I figured this is because I looked how flutter itself does it for its classes. I took ListView as example and when trying to use it it has these suggestions:

After choosing one of the imports, when Ctrl+clicking on ListView I found out ListView is actually located at
```
<my_flutter_directory>packagesflutterlibsrcwidgetsscroll_view.dart
```
So I thought for myself "Can I actually directly import it from there?" and the answer is yes. I removed the suggested import and wrote this instead:
```
import 'package:flutter/src/widgets/scroll_view.dart';
```
And this works as expected although the IDE gives the following warning
```
Import of a library in the 'lib/src' directory of another package.
```
Which makes me think that it’s not normal to import from there and also why it doesn’t show up in the suggestions, so that’s probably the way to do it.
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