Recently we’ve been exploring the ability to extend the base State<T> class, to add additional capabilities to our views, or writing our own custom Mixins to do the same.

Most Developers are familiar with using the various framework Mixins, like TickerProviderStateMixin but what is not commonly known, is how easy it is to create your own flavors of these. Additionally, many developers extend State<T> constantly, and write very repetitive boilerplate code, without realizing how easy it is to create their own BaseState<T> instead.

In this example, we’ll make a “base state” that provides 3 AnimatorControllers to any widget that needs to animate something. We could then apply this to any Widget in our application, and it automatically get 3 animators to play with. No setup, or teardown required.

One of the more verbose parts of Flutter is pushing new pages into the Navigator Stack, especially if you want to use something other than the standard Material or Cupertino Routes.

The standard recommendation from Flutter Docs, is to just build your PageRoutes inside your button handlers, and then pass them directly into Navigator from your views. Something like:

Navigator.of(context).push(MaterialPageRoute(builder: (c)=> MyPage()))

This works, but can end duplicated the same code all around your code base replicating the same transitions, violating the core tenant of DRY programming. Additionally if you’re using custom routes, then you’ll be forced to create additional widgets for each type, or worse, copy tons of boilerplate from view to view.