Skip to main content

Flutter: TabView Widget Tutorial

Introduction

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to create Tabs in Flutter using the TabView widget. There are plenty of apps using Tabs and they provide a clean and compact design of the app.

Table of Contents

  • Project Setup
  • Code
  • Conclusion

Project Setup

We do not need and other plugins for this tutorial. Also, you can proceed with your own project or create a new project for this tutorial.
Here is the Starting Code of the app.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main() {
  runApp(MyApp());
}

class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return MaterialApp(
      title: 'TabView Tutorial All About Flutter',
      theme: ThemeData(
        primarySwatch: Colors.yellow,
      ),
      home: HomePage(),
    );
  }
}

class HomePage extends StatelessWidget {
  const HomePage({Key? key}) : super(key: key);

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold();
  }
}

Code

There are mainly two ways of creating Tabs in Flutter. First using DefaultTabController widgets and second TabController.
For this tutorial, we are going to use DefaultTabController. It is very easy to set up and all descendants or child widgets inherit the TabController. We don't need to provide the TabController separately.

So where we have returned the Scaffold widget replace it with DefaultTabController widget.
return DefaultTabController(
  length: length, 
  child: child,
);

Now here we have to provide the length and the child.
length is the number of tabs and child is the child widget you want to display.
I will use three tabs so the length will be equals to 3 and the child will be a Scaffold widget. 
DefaultTabController(
  length: 3,
  child: Scaffold(
    appBar: AppBar(
      title: Text("Tabs AAF"),
    ),
    body: Container(),
  ),
);

But we need to display the Tabs. So AppBar has a field and that is the bottom field. Here we will provide the list of Tabs in the TabBar widget.
AppBar(
  title: Text("Tabs AAF"),
  bottom: TabBar(
    tabs: [
      Tab(
        icon: Icon(Icons.home),
        text: "Home",
      ),
      Tab(
        icon: Icon(Icons.account_box),
        text: "Account",
      ),
      Tab(
        icon: Icon(Icons.web),
        text: "Internet",
      ),
    ],
  ),
),

Here are the Tabs. Remember that the number of the Tabs and the length should be the same.

Now let us provide some content to our app.

In the body field of the Scaffold widget, we are going to place the contents in each tab. Here we are going to use the TabBarView widget and in the children field, we provide the list of widgets and here it is three.
body: TabBarView(
  children: [],
),

Now I am going to use display a Text widget at the centre of the screen. It is completely your choice what you want to display.
Again remember that the number of children should be three.
TabBarView(
  children: [
    Center(
      child: Text(
        "Home",
        style: TextStyle(
          fontSize: 32.0,
          fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
        ),
      ),
    ),
    Center(
      child: Text(
        "Account",
        style: TextStyle(
          fontSize: 32.0,
          fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
        ),
      ),
    ),
    Center(
      child: Text(
        "Internet",
        style: TextStyle(
          fontSize: 32.0,
          fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
        ),
      ),
    ),
  ],
),

Now run the app and see the result.
Tab View Flutter
Tab View Flutter

So we have successfully implemented tabs in our app.

But there might be chances where the number of tabs is much more. In such instances, if we do not modify our code the tabs will be shrunk giving a very bad appearance to the app. Instead, in the TabBar widget, there is a field isScrollable. It takes a boolean value and if it is true the Tabs at the top becomes scrollable.
So I am modifying the code to the number of tabs six and just duplicating the contents of both TabView and TabBarView and TabBar as follows.
DefaultTabController(
  length: 6,
  child: Scaffold(
    appBar: AppBar(
      title: Text("Tabs AAF"),
      bottom: TabBar(
        isScrollable: true,
        tabs: [
          Tab(
            icon: Icon(Icons.home),
            text: "Home",
          ),
          Tab(
            icon: Icon(Icons.account_box),
            text: "Account",
          ),
          Tab(
            icon: Icon(Icons.web),
            text: "Internet",
          ),
          Tab(
            icon: Icon(Icons.home),
            text: "Home",
          ),
          Tab(
            icon: Icon(Icons.account_box),
            text: "Account",
          ),
          Tab(
            icon: Icon(Icons.web),
            text: "Internet",
          ),
        ],
      ),
    ),
    body: TabBarView(
      children: [
        Center(
          child: Text(
            "Home",
            style: TextStyle(
              fontSize: 32.0,
              fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
            ),
          ),
        ),
        Center(
          child: Text(
            "Account",
            style: TextStyle(
              fontSize: 32.0,
              fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
            ),
          ),
        ),
        Center(
          child: Text(
            "Internet",
            style: TextStyle(
              fontSize: 32.0,
              fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
            ),
          ),
        ),
        Center(
          child: Text(
            "Home",
            style: TextStyle(
              fontSize: 32.0,
              fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
            ),
          ),
        ),
        Center(
          child: Text(
            "Account",
            style: TextStyle(
              fontSize: 32.0,
              fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
            ),
          ),
        ),
        Center(
          child: Text(
            "Internet",
            style: TextStyle(
              fontSize: 32.0,
              fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
            ),
          ),
        ),
      ],
    ),
  ),
);

Now run the app again.
Tab View with Multiple tabs
Tab View with Multiple tabs

Hence we have learned how to make an app with Tabs.
Here is the full code.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main() {
  runApp(MyApp());
}

class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return MaterialApp(
      title: 'TabView Tutorial All About Flutter',
      theme: ThemeData(
        primarySwatch: Colors.yellow,
      ),
      home: HomePage(),
    );
  }
}

class HomePage extends StatelessWidget {
  const HomePage({Key? key}) : super(key: key);

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return DefaultTabController(
      length: 6,
      child: Scaffold(
        appBar: AppBar(
          title: Text("Tabs AAF"),
          bottom: TabBar(
            isScrollable: true,
            tabs: [
              Tab(
                icon: Icon(Icons.home),
                text: "Home",
              ),
              Tab(
                icon: Icon(Icons.account_box),
                text: "Account",
              ),
              Tab(
                icon: Icon(Icons.web),
                text: "Internet",
              ),
              Tab(
                icon: Icon(Icons.home),
                text: "Home",
              ),
              Tab(
                icon: Icon(Icons.account_box),
                text: "Account",
              ),
              Tab(
                icon: Icon(Icons.web),
                text: "Internet",
              ),
            ],
          ),
        ),
        body: TabBarView(
          children: [
            Center(
              child: Text(
                "Home",
                style: TextStyle(
                  fontSize: 32.0,
                  fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
                ),
              ),
            ),
            Center(
              child: Text(
                "Account",
                style: TextStyle(
                  fontSize: 32.0,
                  fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
                ),
              ),
            ),
            Center(
              child: Text(
                "Internet",
                style: TextStyle(
                  fontSize: 32.0,
                  fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
                ),
              ),
            ),
            Center(
              child: Text(
                "Home",
                style: TextStyle(
                  fontSize: 32.0,
                  fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
                ),
              ),
            ),
            Center(
              child: Text(
                "Account",
                style: TextStyle(
                  fontSize: 32.0,
                  fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
                ),
              ),
            ),
            Center(
              child: Text(
                "Internet",
                style: TextStyle(
                  fontSize: 32.0,
                  fontWeight: FontWeight.w700,
                ),
              ),
            ),
          ],
        ),
      ),
    );
  }
}

Conclusion

So we learned how to create tabs in the Flutter app. WE learned four new widgets, Tabs, DefaultTabController, TabBar and TabBarView. Hope you liked the tutorial. If you have any doubts, comment below.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Flutter: DatePicker Tutorial both with Material and Cupertino Style

Introduction DatePicker is very important when you want the user to pick his / her date of birth or something else. In Flutter, implementing DatePicker is very easy and we will implement DatePicker in both Android or Material style and Cupertino or IOS style.  Table of contents Approach Project Setup Material Style DatePicker Cupertino Style DatePicker Conclusion Approach Flutter has widgets for everything and even for DatePicker. DatePicker widget is loaded with all needed animation and colours. So implementation is very easy.  Project Setup No extra plugins are required for this project and you can continue with your existing project. Here is the starting code. class DatePickerTutorial extends StatefulWidget { const DatePickerTutorial({Key? key}) : super (key: key); @ override _DatePickerTutorialState createState() => _DatePickerTutorialState(); } class _DatePickerTutorialState extends State...

Flutter: DraggableScrollableSheet widget Tutorial

Introduction In this tutorial, we are going to learn about the DraggableScrollableSheet widget. It is a widget that responds to user gestures. When the user drags from the bottom of the screen in the upward direction, the widget opens up and when scrolls down the widget close. The final app will look as follows  Final App DraggableScrollableSheet It is a widget that scrolls up and down of the viewport or screen according to the user's screen gestures. This widget becomes handy when you want to give some extra details which are lengthy content but don't want to navigate to a new screen. You might have come across many apps that implement the same thing. So let us learn to implement DraggableScrollableSheet in our own app. Approach The approach of our project is very simple. In our app, we are going to display some names of countries with the help of the  ListView.builder  and Li...

Flutter : Image Picker Tutorial | Pick single image from Gallery

Introduction In this tutorial, we will create an image picker and display the content on the screen . I mage Picker picks a file from the Storage or Camera and stores it in an XFile object. Implementation Install dependency We will first need the image_picker dependency . To install it, add the following dependency to pubspec.yaml file. image_picker: ^0.8.4+3 Then click on Get Packages in your IDE or run the following command on your Terminal / Command Prompt. flutter pub get Example Import the dependency in your dart file. import 'package:image_picker/image_picker.dart' ; Syntax Image picking is a future task . So we need to await the image picking . Here is the syntax. await _picker.pickImage( source : ImageSource.gallery); Here we have provided the source from the gallery . We can also provide the source as a Camera using the following syntax. await _picker.pickImage( source : Ima...