default texteditingcontroller for custom text field widget

Question

I want a default empty controller for my custom text field but its not allowing with both ways

Answer 1

You cannot have a const constructor and use a non constant default value. Therefore you would have to remove the const keyword before CustomTextField. But you can also not have a non-constant value as an optional parameter.

So a suggestion is to change the stateless widget to a stateful widget and initialize the controller in the init() method if no controller is provided with the the contructor.

Answer 2

It's better to set a default controller like this, so we can dispose it to prevent memory leaks:

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

class CustomTextField extends StatefulWidget {
  const CustomTextField({
    Key? key,
    this.controller,
  }) : super(key: key);

  final TextEditingController? controller;

  @override
  State<CustomTextField> createState() => _CustomTextFieldState();
}

class _CustomTextFieldState extends State<CustomTextField> {
  late TextEditingController _controller;

  @override
  void initState() {
    super.initState();
    _controller = widget.controller ?? TextEditingController();
  }

  @override
  void dispose() {
    if (widget.controller == null) {
      // if we made the controller ourselves, we dispose it ourselves
      // but if it's made outside of this widget, it should be disposed outside
      _controller.dispose();
    }
    super.dispose();
  }

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