How to Build a Flutter File Picker

These days, mobile applications are becoming more and more complex. One of the most important features for any mobile app is the ability to access and manage files. This is where the Flutter File Picker comes in. With the File Picker, users can access their device’s file system and select a file to use in their app.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to build a Flutter File Picker. We’ll cover everything from creating the project to implementing the File Picker in your app. Let’s get started!

Creating the Flutter Project

The first step is to create a new Flutter project. To do this, open up the terminal and run the following command:

flutter create <project_name>

Replace <project_name> with the name of your project.

Once the project is created, open it in your favorite code editor.

Installing file_picker

The next step is to install the file_picker package. This is a popular package that allows you to access files from the device’s file system.

To install it, open up the pubspec.yaml file and add the following line:

dependencies:
  file_picker: ^1.6.1

Now save the file and run the following command in the terminal to install the package:

flutter pub get

Implementing the File Picker in Flutter

Now that we have everything set up, let’s take a look at how to implement the File Picker.

First, we need to import the file_picker package into our project. To do this, open the main.dart file and add the following line at the top:

import 'package:file_picker/file_picker.dart';

Now, we can create a function that will open the File Picker. This function should return a Future that will contain the selected file.

Future<File> openFilePicker() async {
  FilePickerResult result = await FilePicker.platform.pickFiles();
  if (result != null) {
    return result.files.first;
  }
  return null;
}

The openFilePicker() function will open the File Picker and allow the user to select a file. Once the user has selected a file, the function will return it as a File object.

Finally, we can call the openFilePicker() function whenever we need the user to select a file. For example, if we wanted to select an image, we could do the following:

Future<void> selectImage() async {
  File imageFile = await openFilePicker();
  if (imageFile != null) {
    // Do something with the image file
  }
}

In this example, we call the openFilePicker() function and use the returned File object to do something with the image.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we showed you how to build a Flutter File Picker. We covered everything from creating the project to implementing the File Picker in your app. We hope you found this tutorial helpful and that you’ll be able to use the File Picker in your own projects.