pythonflutteruser-controlsflet

What incentivizes inheriting from UserControl instead of some other widget?

The main direction Flet documentation points you to is the usage of UserControls when trying to make custom widgets/controls. UserControl itself inherits from Stack and also comes with a build method that can be used to return something other than a Stack-like.

But if so, why not just inherit from, say, a Container? The code I'm using is this:

class ArrowButton(Container):
    def __init__(self, arrow_icon: Icons):
        super().__init__(
            height=100, 
            width=100, 
            bgcolor=Colors.WHITE, 
            border_radius=500,
            content=Icon(
                name=arrow_icon,
                size=100,
                color=Colors.BLACK,
            )
        )

I can also add methods to change the state, so I don't see why I would specifically need UserControl + its build method. In fact, I have a different project where I built a custom tab system (similar to a web browser) where all custom classes (4 of them) all inherit from Container and whole thing works precisely as intended.

So yeah, what kind of purpose/use case would necessitate the usage of UserControl instead of some other widget? Is there some kind of Flutter-specific nuance I'm missing here?

Solution

  • You are absolutely right! :) This is actually the reason why we marked it as "deprecated" in v0.21.0 and it will soon be removed in v0.26.0

    We also updated the section of the docs concerned with the creation of custom controls in Flet: https://flet.dev/docs/getting-started/custom-controls