[📝] Today #7: Running Into Things Yourself Really Is Best

✨ GPT Summary 　

A day when I learned a lot through hands-on practice while debugging Date Picker and Rich Text Editor issues during implementation of a diary feature with FlutterFlow.

🎯 Goals

• ✅️ FlutterFlow Practice: Add diary feature

💭 Diary

This morning, a colleague and I alternated Driver / Navigator roles every five minutes and tried making a diary page in FlutterFlow.

Unlike my inflated expectations, even changing the Text of a Button with a simple Date Picker feature into the date selected with the Date Picker was not easy at all.

No matter how I looked at it, the Action and Page State variable seemed properly set, but all kinds of issues kept bursting out.

Even after digging through documentation and lecture videos, I was sure I had done exactly the same thing, yet I could not figure out why it was happening. In the end, I stayed absorbed in debugging all the way through lunch break.

And finally solved it.

• In Preview mode, 2024-12-20 did not appear and only [y-M-d] showed.
  • Originally, many features do not work in FlutterFlow’s Preview mode.
• In Test build mode, a compile error exploded saying something about a duplicate variable declaration.
  • I had originally declared the variable to put into the Button’s Text as datePicked (Page State variable).
  • But, I suspect, the name of the variable linked to FlutterFlow’s built-in Date Picker seems to be datePicked. (When I saw the log after selecting a date appear like Date Picked: 2024-12-20 00:00:00, I got a bad feeling.)
  • So when I changed the variable name to dateSelected, it worked exactly as intended without errors.
  • I felt like my naming sense had matched the FlutterFlow developers’, which was funny and absurd at the same time.

In the afternoon, I first succeeded in changing the diary writing area, which had been made only with a TextField, into a RichTextEditor (Rich Text Editor). After that I also tried changing it into a MarkdownEditor (super_editor), but the Custom Widget dependency and the super_editor package dependency conflicted, turning into a total debugging chaos show. In the end, my mental energy was wiped clean and I called GG.

It was tiring to spend the entire day doing nothing but debugging (with GPT), but as expected, learning by running into things directly and touching them yourself is much faster and more fun than just watching lectures forever. Of course, if I had not watched the lectures at all, it would probably have taken more time to understand the cause and debug it.