Dart Programming - Packages

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A package is a mechanism to encapsulate a group of programming units. Applications might at times need integration of some third-party libraries or plugins. Every language has a mechanism for managing external packages like Maven or Gradle for Java, Nuget for .NET, npm for Node.js, etc. The package manager for Dart is pub.

Pub helps to install packages in the repository. The repository of packages hosted can be found at https://pub.dartlang.org/.

The package metadata is defined in a file, pubsec.yaml. YAML is the acronym for Yet Another Markup Language. The pub tool can be used to download all various libraries that an application requires.

Every Dart application has a pubspec.yaml file which contains the application dependencies to other libraries and metadata of applications like application name, author, version, and description.

The contents of a pubspec.yaml file should look something like this −

name: 'vector_victor' 
version: 0.0.1 
description: An absolute bare-bones web app. 
... 
dependencies: browser: '>=0.10.0 <0.11.0'

The important pub commands are as follows −

Sr.No Command & Description
1

‘pub get’

Helps to get all packages your application is depending on.
2

‘pub upgrade’

Upgrades all your dependencies to a newer version.
3

‘pub build’

This s used for building your web application and it will create a build folder , with all related scripts in it.
4

‘pub help’

This will give you help for all different pub commands.

If you are using an IDE like WebStorm, then you can right-click on the pubspec.yaml to get all the commands directly −

Pubspec.yaml

Installing a Package

Consider an example where an application needs to parse xml. Dart XML is a lightweight library that is open source and stable for parsing, traversing, querying and building XML documents.

The steps for achieving the said task is as follows −

Step 1 − Add the following to the pubsec.yaml file.

name: TestApp 
version: 0.0.1 
description: A simple console application. 
#dependencies: 
#  foo_bar: '>=1.0.0 <2.0.0' 
dependencies: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/images/cleardot.gif
xml:

Right-click on the pubsec.yaml and get dependencies. This will internally fire the pub get command as shown below.

Pub Get Command

The downloaded packages and its dependent packages can be verified under the packages folder.

Packages

Since installation is completed now, we need to refer the dart xml in the project. The syntax is as follows −

import 'package:xml/xml.dart' as xml;

Read XML String

To read XML string and verify the input, Dart XML uses a parse() method. The syntax is as follows −

xml.parse(String input):

Example : Parsing XML String Input

The following example shows how to parse XML string input −

import 'package:xml/xml.dart' as xml; 
void main(){ 
   print("xml"); 
   var bookshelfXml = '''<?xml version = "1.0"?> 
   <bookshelf> 
      <book> 
         <title lang = "english">Growing a Language</title> 
         <price>29.99</price> 
      </book> 
      
      <book> 
         <title lang = "english">Learning XML</title> 
         <price>39.95</price> 
      </book> 
      <price>132.00</price> 
   </bookshelf>'''; 
   
   var document = xml.parse(bookshelfXml); 
   print(document.toString()); 
}

It should produce the following output −

xml 
<?xml version = "1.0"?><bookshelf> 
   <book> 
      <title lang = "english">Growing a Language</title> 
      <price>29.99</price> 
   </book> 

   <book> 
      <title lang = "english">Learning XML</title> 
      <price>39.95</price> 
   </book> 
   <price>132.00</price> 
</bookshelf>
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