A deeper look at the stateful widget life cycle

In the previous chapter, we looked at how stateful widgets differ from stateless widgets and how the build() method can be called multiple times, triggered by the setState() method.

However, there are some additional parts of the life cycle of a stateful widget that we must explore at this point because they are important to how we manage input data. They will also become increasingly important throughout the rest of this book as we look at more advanced widget interactions.

Key life cycle states

There are several life cycle states that a stateful widget can pass through. In this section, we will look at the states that you will need in most situations. Later in this book, we will introduce additional life cycle states for specific scenarios and corner cases.

Creation of the state

The creation of a state happens at the very start of the stateful widget’s life cycle, just after the constructor is called. The stateful...