Gesture Detector in Row- Flutter

In flutter, GestureDetector is a commonly used widget. It is simply a widget that detects gestures. It can be used to wrap other widgets that you want to be clickable. This enables us to create custom buttons and custom clickable widgets. However, when a Row is wrapped with a GestureDetector the GestureDetector detects clicks on only the children of the Row and not the entire Row itself. Confused? Take a look at the image below.

On the first Row, when the white space between “Press this Text” and “Or press this Text” is clicked, no action is carried out. However, on the second Row when the white space is clicked the action is carried out. In this article, we’ll be looking at how to make the entire Row clickable and not just children of the Row.

1. create your flutter project

This can be achieved by running

flutter create project_name

2. Add this to your main.dart file

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main() {
runApp(const MyApp());
}

class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
const MyApp({Key? key}) : super(key: key);

@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return MaterialApp(
title: 'Row in Gesture Detector',
theme: ThemeData(
primarySwatch: Colors.blue,
),
debugShowCheckedModeBanner: false,
home: const MyHomePage(title: 'Row in Gesture Detector'),
);
}
}

class MyHomePage extends StatefulWidget {
const MyHomePage({Key? key, required this.title}) : super(key: key);

final String title;

@override
State createState() => _MyHomePageState();
}

class _MyHomePageState extends State {

@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return Scaffold();
}
}

3. Create the increment method to test the gesture behavior

Add this to the MyHomePageState class

int _counter = 0;

void _incrementCounter() {
setState(() {
_counter++;
});
}

4. Create the Row and wrap with Gesture Detector

Add this to the Scaffold body

return Scaffold(
appBar: AppBar(
title: Text(widget.title),
),
body: Center(
child: Column(
mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
children: [
GestureDetector(
onTap: _incrementCounter,
child: Row(
mainAxisSize: MainAxisSize.max,
mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.spaceAround,
crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.center,
children: const [
Text(
'Press this Text'
),
Text(
'Or press this Text'
)
],
),
),
const SizedBox(height: 80,),
GestureDetector(
behavior: HitTestBehavior.opaque,
onTap: _incrementCounter,
child: Row(
mainAxisSize: MainAxisSize.max,
mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.spaceAround,
crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.center,
children: const [
Text(
'Press white space'
),
Text(
'Press white space'
)
],
),
),
const SizedBox(height: 60,),
Text(
'$_counter',
style: Theme.of(context).textTheme.headline4,
),
],
),
),
);

If you notice in the code, we have two sepeate Rows wrapped with GestureDetector. One has behavior set while the other doesn’t. The GestureDetector with behavior set is the one that enables the whole Row clickable and I’ll be explaining that shortly.
The GestureDetector widget has a field behavior that determines how the GestureDetector acts when hit. The behavior field is of type HitTestBehavior. By default, the behavior field is set to HitTestBehavior.deferToChild which ensures that the GestureDetector receives events only when one of the children of its target is being hit. That sometimes might not be a good user experience. Setting the behavior field to HitTestBehavior.Opaque enables the GestureDetector to receive events as long as the hit was received within the target’s bounds.

Conclusion

We have reached the end of this article. I hope it has been helpful so far. If you have any more questions or want to engage feel free to connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Do appreciate the article with some claps and comments.

If you want the complete code, here is a link to the github repository of the project.