Flutter ListView lazy loading

Question

How can I realize items lazy loading for endless listview? I want to load more items by network when user scroll to the end of listview.

Answer 1

You can listen to a ScrollController.

ScrollController has some useful information, such as the scrolloffset and a list of ScrollPosition.

In your case the interesting part is in controller.position which is the currently visible ScrollPosition. Which represents a segment of the scrollable.

ScrollPosition contains informations about it's position inside the scrollable. Such as extentBefore and extentAfter. Or it's size, with extentInside.

Considering this, you could trigger a server call based on extentAfter which represents the remaining scroll space available.

Here's an basic example using what I said.

class MyHome extends StatefulWidget {
  @override
  _MyHomeState createState() => _MyHomeState();
}

class _MyHomeState extends State<MyHome> {
  ScrollController controller;
  List<String> items = List.generate(100, (index) => 'Hello $index');

  @override
  void initState() {
    super.initState();
    controller = ScrollController()..addListener(_scrollListener);
  }

  @override
  void dispose() {
    controller.removeListener(_scrollListener);
    super.dispose();
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      body: Scrollbar(
        child: ListView.builder(
          controller: controller,
          itemBuilder: (context, index) {
            return Text(items[index]);
          },
          itemCount: items.length,
        ),
      ),
    );
  }

  void _scrollListener() {
    print(controller.position.extentAfter);
    if (controller.position.extentAfter < 500) {
      setState(() {
        items.addAll(List.generate(42, (index) => 'Inserted $index'));
      });
    }
  }
}

---

You can clearly see that when reaching the end of the scroll, it scrollbar expends due to having loaded more items.

Answer 2

Thanks for Rémi Rousselet's approach, but it does not solve all the problem. Especially when the ListView has scrolled to the bottom, it still calls the scrollListener a couple of times. The improved approach is to combine Notification Listener with Remi's approach. Here is my solution:

bool _handleScrollNotification(ScrollNotification notification) {
  if (notification is ScrollEndNotification) {
    if (_controller.position.extentAfter == 0) {
      loadMore();
    }
  }
  return false;
}

@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    final Widget gridWithScrollNotification = NotificationListener<
            ScrollNotification>(
        onNotification: _handleScrollNotification,
        child: GridView.count(
            controller: _controller,
            padding: EdgeInsets.all(4.0),
          // Create a grid with 2 columns. If you change the scrollDirection to
          // horizontal, this would produce 2 rows.
          crossAxisCount: 2,
          crossAxisSpacing: 2.0,
          mainAxisSpacing: 2.0,
          // Generate 100 Widgets that display their index in the List
          children: _documents.map((doc) {
            return GridPhotoItem(
              doc: doc,
            );
          }).toList()));
    return new Scaffold(
      key: _scaffoldKey,
      body: RefreshIndicator(
       onRefresh: _handleRefresh, child: gridWithScrollNotification));
}