Our fourth and final main release of this year, 2020 Volume 4, was rolled out on December 17. We have included several new controls and many exciting features across all the platforms.
In this blog, I am going to give you a quick overview of the new widget and features included in our Flutter suite.
New Spark charts
A new Spark chart widget has been added to the Flutter platform. It is a lightweight chart that can fit even in a very small area. With this chart, you can elegantly display trends in the data and convey quick information to the user. It has simplified APIs to populate and visualize trends quickly.
The Flutter Spark chart comes with the following features:
- Line, area, column, and win-loss chart types.
- Support to plot number, categorical, and date-time values.
- Markers and data labels to display additional information about data points. They also help highlight specific points like high, low, first, and last points.
- You can enable the trackball feature when the plot area is too small to show data labels. You can also show a tooltip when you interact with a chart.
New features and improvements
Let’s see the new features and improvements that we made in the existing Flutter widgets. I am going to cover only the main highlights of each widget.
Calendar
In the Flutter Calendar widget, you can design your own custom UI for events, appointments, and special time regions.
Refer to the following screenshot.
The view navigation and date-picker pop-up animation has also been improved. Previously, we had sliding-type animation. Now, it uses fading-type animation.
Charts
In the Syncfusion Flutter Charts, you can now specify the maximum width for the axis labels and the spacing between the axis line and axis titles. When the label exceeds the maximum size, then the label will be trimmed like in the following screenshot.
The trackball tooltips UI can now be designed as you like.
DataGrid
The high-performance Flutter DataGrid has been updated. You can now add multiple stacked headers spanning multiple columns. This will help you in providing a common header for multiple columns.
Infinite scrolling and load more options are now available in addition to the paging feature.
Date Range Picker
In the Flutter Date Range Picker, you can design your own custom UI for the month and year cells with any kind of widget.
The Hijiri calendar is also now supported.
You can vertically stack two calendar views to enhance the user experience in mobile devices.
Maps
The Flutter Maps widget has the following new, useful features:
- Built-in support to load GeoJSON data from network, assets, and memory.
- A bar legend with gradient support.
- Shape sublayers with GeoJSON data can be added in another shape layer or tile layer to show more details about a particular region.
- Polylines, lines, polygons, circles, and arcs can be added as sublayers in the shape and tile layers features in the Flutter Maps widget.
Refer to the following screenshots.
Navigation route drawn using arcs 
Navigation route drawn using polylines
PDF Viewer
The Syncfusion Flutter PDF Viewer is now available with text selection in all PDF documents.
You can also allow users to search for text in PDF documents, as well as navigate using document link annotation in the table of contents.
PDF Library
The following features have been added in the Flutter PDF Library:
- Encrypt and decrypt a PDF document.
- Create, read, and edit layers in a PDF document.
- Create PDF conformance documents such as PDF/A-1B, PDF/A-2B, and PDF/A-3B.
- Add attachments to a PDF document.
Excel Library
The following features have been added in the Flutter Excel Library:
- Add hyperlinks to text and images.
- Easily insert and delete rows and columns in an Excel file.
- Autofit rows and columns.
- Create Excel documents with logical functions, string functions, and nested formulas.
- Use the following chart types: area, stacked Area, 100% stacked area, 100% stacked column, 100% stacked bar, 100% stacked line.
- Protect your Excel workbooks and worksheets from editing by unauthorized users.
Conclusion
In this blog post, I have given you a quick overview of some of the major features added to our Flutter suite in the 2020 Volume 4 release. To see all the updates of this release, please check out our What’s New and release notes pages.
I hope you are excited to use these new features in your applications. Try them out and share your feedback in the comments section below.
You can also check out the complete user guide and our samples in this GitHub location. Please have a look at our demo apps in Google Play Store, App Store, and on our website.
If you need a new widget for the Flutter framework or new features in our existing widgets, you can let us know in our support forums, Direct-Trac, or feedback portal. As always, we are happy to assist you!
