Share Text, Images with Flutter

As a part of our flutter tutorial series, we’re going to learn how to work with the flutter share package. Using this, we can share text, images, files from the flutter app to another app. For this example, we’re going to use a package called share

Usage

• Helps you to share text, files to another app

---

Getting started

To start, we need to create a new flutter project or we can use any existing flutter project.

flutter create learnflutter
cd learnflutter

To use the share package, we need to add it into pubspec.yaml

dependencies:
  share: ^0.6.5+4

After the plugin is added we need to run flutter pub get to install the required dependencies

Sharing Text with Flutter

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:share/share.dart';

class HomePage extends StatelessWidget {
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text("Share"),
      ),
      body: Center(
          child: RaisedButton(
        child: Text("Share"),
        onPressed: () {
          Share.share("Sample Share Text");
        },
      )),
    );
  }
}

Explanation

• As a first step, we imported the share plugin
• When the user pressed the button, we called Share.share() to share custom text

---

How to share files in flutter?

In case, if you want to share files we can use Share.shareFiles(). which required a directory path to share. For that, we’re going to use a package called file_picker

Add this into your pubspec.yaml & run flutter pub get

dependencies:
  file_picker: ^2.0.13

If you faced any issue while building the app, please refer to troubleshooting: http://github.com/miguelpruivo/flutter_file_picker/wiki/Troubleshooting

 

Sharing Single File in Flutter

RaisedButton(
  child: Text("Share"),
  onPressed: () async {
    FilePickerResult result = await FilePicker.platform.pickFiles();
    if (result != null) {
      print(result.files.single.path);
      Share.shareFiles(["${result.files.single.path}"], text: "Images");
    }
  },
),

In the above example, we get only one file path and passing into Share.shareFiles

Sharing Multiple Files in Flutter

RaisedButton(
  child: Text("Share"),
  onPressed: () async {
    FilePickerResult result =
        await FilePicker.platform.pickFiles(allowMultiple: true);
    if (result != null) {
      List files = result.paths.map((f) => File(f).path).toList();
      Share.shareFiles(files, text: "Multiple Files");
    }
  },
),

In the above example, we’re fetching multiple files and convert into a List of files path and then pass to the share function

How to Restrict File Extension

RaisedButton(
  child: Text("Share"),
  onPressed: () async {
    FilePickerResult result = await FilePicker.platform.pickFiles(
      allowMultiple: true,
      allowedExtensions: ['jpg', 'pdf'],
      type: FileType.custom,
    );
    if (result != null) {
      List files = result.paths.map((f) => File(f).path).toList();
      Share.shareFiles(files, text: "Multiple Files");
    }
  },
),

Here, we restricted file extension using allowedExtensions & FileType.custom

 

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