Does setState rebuild the whole widget tree for a screen in flutter and how does it compare with other State management

Question

I'm kinda confused, I have been looking into state management with flutter recently and I was wondering what happens if a custom stateful widget is placed in a stateless widget, let's say widgetA (parent) is a stateless widget and it has a child WidgetB which is a stateful widget and another child WidgetC which is a stateless widget.

Now my questions are:

• if setState() is called from widgetB, are WidgetA, B, and C rebuilt?
• how does this compare to using different state Management techniques like State provider, stream builders, or Bloc?
• when to use setState()?
• is it smart to combine multiple State management techniques?

if you have external links or resources that can help me understand please provide them

Answer 1

If I say something wrong, someone please correct me.

Answering your questions in order:

1. If you call setState() on WidgetB it'll rebuild itself and it's descendants, no matter if they are Stateless or Stateful Widgets.

2. Using the BLoC approach, most of the times it's optional to use Stateful Widgets and setState() to manage State. In this approach you'll use events from the UI, which will be converted into 'States' inside your BLoC. This States will be passed into a Stream. Your UI will rebuild itself using StreamBuilders every time they listen to a new value on the Stream they're listening. This will trigger the StreamBuilder to rebuilt itself and it's descendants.

3. If you're using BLoC or Provider + Streams, I would recommend avoiding setState() and StatefulWidgets, maybe with some exceptions like UI things, eg. animations.

4. BLoC is a design approach with goes nice with the Provider package. The BLoC package even uses Provider internally.

P.S.: Whereas BLoC is an Architecture Pattern to manage the Data and State of your application. Provider is 'just' a wrapper around Inherited Widgets that facilitate exposure of Data throughout your Widget tree, not an Architecture Pattern.

Other example of architecture pattern solution to manage state that uses the provider package is MobX.