The meeting primarily discussed the data structure and flow of data between project APIs in order to render a list of players and their headshots, with reference to platforms like Xano and FlutterFlow. Initially, the State Changers discussed the complexity of the participant's current data structure which seemed to include team rosters within team names. This complexity was deemed as playing on "hard mode", in effect making it difficult to extract and work with the intended information - player headshots.
Ray, one of the State Changers, then recommended a way to simplify this process by making a series of focused API calls that can bring in refined data - a list of players, filtered for specific teams. The key idea was to ensure the data delivered to the mobile device was simple and precise. Also, shrinking the payload size was necessary due to network performance being a crucial factor for mobile devices. By doing so, the simpler data structure would not only improve performance but also make data iteration much easier. The conversation further moved towards the method of setting up the user interface (UI) in FlutterFlow to display the received data. Attached to the API request, the ListView could generate children from the variable which could then be connected with elements (in this case, the image element representing player headshots) to display image URLs. Ray also clarified the preference of using 'item' over 'response' as the ListView intelligently breaks down the list received from the API into individual items for each list view. In conclusion, Ray suggested thinking from the perspective of the entity being looked for - a list of players, in this example. Wrangling the data should be done on the Xano side, and displaying that data should be handled by FlutterFlow, allowing each tool to perform at their strength and for more efficient rendering of the headshots.
(Source: Office Hours 2/16 )
