Best practice for resetting app state on events like sign out

[aardrop]

I wonder if people have a best practice for resetting their app on events like signout. I have tried things like Pheonix but always come into the disposed provider called. I want to reset the entire app state back to the initial launch on signout, but I can't seem to do this cleanly.

Do others have recommendations or a best practice for things like this?

[rrousselGit]

You should "ref.watch" the login state inside providers which need to be reset

[aardrop]

Apologies allow me to clarify, I have tons of pages and providers and some listen to the login state others don't but all of them have to be completely reset on signout. I've tried refresh and invalidate but when we have over 40 providers it's convoluted

[JulianBissekkou]

We have the same problem and we solved it by recreating the ProviderContainer and using a UnconrolledProviderScope.
However, this is quite a workaround and I was wondering if there is a better solution that is less verbose.

@rrousselGit

[rrousselGit]

You aren't supposed to reset everything. That's a big no-no generally, as you would fetch way more than needed.

There are many ways to deal with this. For example, you could create single Repository hosting all the API methods depending on the user. And have that repo ref.watch the token state.

Then if you were to do ref.watch(userRepositoryProvider)), all providers using that repository would naturally update.

[aardrop]

I understand that.

Generally, if our environment is different for each user, we would want to reload every single thing if the user was to log out and log in under a new account.

So if we aren't supposed to reset everything does that mean we need to use methods like union classes to manual reset the state of each provider?

[temcewen]

I think you missed the point of what @rrousselGit was saying. If you're using Firebase for authentication, you can turn your firebase token stream into a Riverpod stream and then watch that in whatever providers should be reset when the user logs out.

Also, should be noted that if your providers are set to autodispose, they should naturally be reset when all the pages are closed due to the user signing out. I believe that autodisposable providers are preferred as they are intrinsically more efficient, so perhaps you can consider transitioning to using more of those.

[Hamid313-coder]

Having the same issue with log out.
any solution?

[ash1497]

I am using provider, all my viewmodels are declared in MultiProviders at the entry level (main.dart). What I did was that I used a keyedSubtree and encompassed the MultiProvider in this widget. essentially all I do now is trigger this upon signout and it essentially resets the app. I can provide the code I used:

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

class RestartWidget extends StatefulWidget {
final Widget child;

const RestartWidget({super.key, required this.child});

static void restartApp(BuildContext context) {
final _RestartWidgetState? state =
context.findAncestorStateOfType<_RestartWidgetState>();
state?.restartApp();
}

@OverRide
// ignore: library_private_types_in_public_api
_RestartWidgetState createState() => _RestartWidgetState();
}

class _RestartWidgetState extends State {
Key key = UniqueKey();

void restartApp() {
setState(() {
key = UniqueKey();
});
}

@OverRide
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return KeyedSubtree(
key: key,
child: widget.child,
);
}
}

And then:

runApp(
RestartWidget(
child: MultiProvider(
providers: [
ALL YOUR PROVIDERS
]
),
),
);

In my signout function, I simply call:
RestartWidget.restartApp(context);
This essentially resets the app as if I fresly launched it, in my case it navigates me right on the sign-in page since that's the entry point if the user isn't signed in.

This was my solution, Not sure if its the best solution but it works for me in the scenario where the user logsout of one account, then logs back into another account right away, the state is refreshed and no data overlap occurs.

If someone has a better solution (Since I am not using RiverPod, just Provider) Please correct/add onto this.

[aardrop]

It's not perfect, but to solve this, we've had to manually manage the disposal of providers like auth, user, and their dependencies.

Our app allows unauthenticated users access to the platform before logging in and then has multiple pages, widgets, and features that unlock once authenticated. As a result we can't just dispose of higher-level widgets and cascade that. So we manually manage the disposal, refresh, and invalidating of providers on an event basis, such as sign out, so that we clear the app state in the reverse order it was constructed without breaking any of the providers or needing to rebuild our main widget page.

I'd love a better way to do this for Riverpod if anyone has a better example, but that is how we handle it.

[ash1497]

fair enough, your specific use-case definitely invalidates my approach since you're serving different content based on auth status, that definitely complicates things, but it seems you have figured out a working solution. In my case, we're building a social media app, so everything is served under the auth umbrella, so for me, I suppose what I have here is more of a brute force approach, but I would rather do this than inject an entire library.