A simple flutter input widget to add @ mentions functionality to your app

26 April 2023
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📛 Flutter Mentions

A simple flutter input widget to add `@` mentions functionality to your app

Install 📦

To use this package, add flutter_mentions as a dependency in your pubspec.yaml file.

You will need to add flutter_mentions to your pubspec.yaml:

dependencies:
  flutter:
    sdk: flutter
  flutter_mentions:

Then, run flutter packages get in your terminal.

Usage 💻

To use this package you must first wrap your top most widget with Portal as this package uses flutter_portal to show the suggestions list.

[Portal], is the equivalent of [Overlay].

This widget will need to be inserted above the widget that needs to render under your overlays.

If you want to display your overlays on the top of everything, a good place to insert that [Portal] is above MaterialApp:

Portal(
  child: MaterialApp(
    ...
  )
);

(works for CupertinoApp too)

This way [Portal] will render above everything. But you could place it somewhere else to change the clip behavior.

Widgets:

FlutterMention

mentions: List<Mention> – List of Mention that the user is allowed to triggered.
suggestionPosition: SuggestionPosition – Suggestion modal position, can be alligned to [Top] or [Bottom].
onMentionAdd: Function(Map<String, dynamic>) – Triggers when the suggestion was added by tapping on suggestion.
suggestionListHeight: double – Max height for the suggestion list. Defaults for 300.0.
onMarkupChanged: Function(String) – A Functioned which is triggered when ever the input changes but with the markup of the selected mentions.
suggestionListDecoration: BoxDecoration – Decoration for the Suggestion list.
defaultText: String – Populate your input field with pre-filled text.
onSearchChange: Function(String trigger, String value) – Fired only when the input changes & user is searching a mention item.
leading: List<Widget> – List of widgets that should be placed before the input.
trailing: List<Widget> – List of widgets that should be placed after the input.
onSuggestionVisibleChanged: Function(bool) – Triggers when the suggestion list visibility changed.
Supports all the other properties that TextField supports.

Mention

trigger: String – A single character that will be used to trigger the suggestions.
data: List<Map<String, dynamic>> – List of Map to represent the suggestions shown to the user. You need to provide two Required properties id & display both are [String] You can also have any custom properties as you like to build custom suggestion widget (NOTE: this can later be updated to show new or filtered mention list).
style: TextStyle – Style for the mention item in Input.
matchAll: bool – Should every non-suggestion with the trigger character be matched.
disableMarkup: bool – Should the markup generation be disabled for this Mention Item.
suggestionBuilder: Widget Function(Map<String, dynamic>) – Build Custom suggestion widget using this builder.
markupBuilder: String Function(String trigger, String mention, String value) – Used to define how the mentions markup should be saved.

example, Mention instance

Mention(
  trigger: "#",
  disableMarkup: true,
  style: TextStyle(
    color: Colors.blue,
  ),
  data: [
    {"id": "reactjs", "display": "reactjs"},
    {"id": "javascript", "display": "javascript"},
  ],
  matchAll: true,
)

Example

FlutterMentions(
  key: key,
  suggestionPosition: SuggestionPosition.Top,
  maxLines: 5,
  minLines: 1,
  mentions: [
    Mention(
      trigger: "@",
      style: TextStyle(color: Colors.purple),
      data: [
        {
          "id": "61as61fsa",
          "display": "fayeedP",
          "photo": "https://images.pexels.com/photos/220453/pexels-photo-220453.jpeg"
        },
        {
          "id": "61asasgasgsag6a",
          "display": "khaled",
          "photo": "https://images.pexels.com/photos/220453/pexels-photo-220453.jpeg",
          style: TextStyle(color: Colors.green),
        },
      ],
    )
  ],
),

You can find detailed example in example folder

Frequently asked questions

1. How do I can access to the the editing controller? A. To get the control of TextEditingController just use a Global key more info can be found here #13. This will also allow you to access the text & markupText.

2. How do I search users as I type? A. Just use the onSearchChange to get the currrent search text & make request to the server and later update the data.

3. What is the need of Portal? A. You should check this comment where I mentioned in more detail the reason behind using portal.