Simplified Flutter App Localization¶

The default way of accessing localized strings inside your widgets is to use the AppLocalizations class.

However, using the ! operator everywhere is not good practice.

And it would be nice to have some more “lightweight” syntax.

A thread. 🧵

One issue we have is that AppLocalizations.of(context) returns a nullable object.

But at runtime this will never be null, as long as we call it inside a descendant of MaterialApp (which is always the case).

So what can we do?

Dart extensions to the rescue!

We can define a LocalizedBuildContext extension with a loc getter variable defined like so:

And now, whenever we need localized strings in our widgets, we can:

• import the file that defines the new extension
• use context.loc.someString to get the value we need

If you have dozens or hundreds of localized strings, this amounts to a lot of developer happiness! 😀

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Happy coding!