Passing around dependencies via InheritedWidget
The Flutter mechanism for passing around dependencies through the tree is called InheritedWidget. You have certainly used it in your Flutter apps, even if you haven’t written one explicitly. Let’s take a look at what InheritedWidget is and how it can help us on our state management journey.
What is InheritedWidget?
As you know, in Flutter, everything is a widget. So far, we have discussed various UI-related building widgets, such as Stateless, Stateful, and Render, as well as their descendants. However, because these widgets are organized in a tree data structure, it is possible to perform various manipulations with it, such as a tree traversal. This capability is useful when we need to not only render static UI but also pass around shared data.
The Flutter framework includes a widget specifically for this purpose: InheritedWidget. It is the last of the fundamental Flutter widgets. If we examine the framework.dart...
