InheritedWidget update cause problems - flutter

Question

I use the inherited widget at the top of my app to update my application whenever a new location is setted. This results in a refresh of my location coordinates at every possible place in my app.
However I also have a textfield. When i tap on the textfield some seconds later
the keyboard will be hidden by the update of the inherited widget.
Is there a way to prevent flutter to hide the keyboard or to reinitialize the state so that the update of the inherited widgets works together with my search field?
It should be also possible that when i enter some text that this trigger the inherited widget for a new update but the search bar and keyboard should stay open.
new TextField(
controller: _controller,
autocorrect: false,
autofocus: true
...
)

Answer 1

Without seeing all of your code, it's a little bit difficult to know what's going on.
My best guess though is that you're using a context somewhere above the TextField to register for updates from the inherited widget.
What I'd advise you to do though is go up the widget tree from your TextField and make sure that you're not using the inherited widget in a context anywhere above it. It might be worth putting some debug statements at the beginning of your build methods to determine exactly where the build is being triggered from (the inherited widget shouldn't trigger a rebuild immediately below it if you're using it right, but stranger things have happened).
This includes if you have something like this:
MyWidget extends StatelessWidget {
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
Location location = MyInheritedWidget.of(context).location;
return new Row(
children: [
new LocationDisplayer(location),
new TextField( ..... ),
],
);
}
}
The reason I say this is that from my understanding of how inherited widgets work; when it changes, whichever widgets whose contexts were used to get the inherited widget get rebuilt.
That means that even though your textfield technically isn't changing any properties, it might actually be a new textfield depending on how the build went (there's a bit of flutter magic I don't fully understand around how they decide when to make new vs re-build things) and therefore it hasn't requested focus.
Rather than having to write a bunch of new widgets to enclose whatever is using MyInheritedWidget, I believe you could use something like this:
MyWidget extends StatelessWidget {
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return new Row(
children: [
new Builder(
builder: (context) {
Location location = MyInheritedWidget.of(context).location;
return new LocationDisplayer(location);
},
),
new TextField( ..... ),
],
);
}
}
If you're 100% sure you're not doing this anywhere, then you could go for the non-flutter way of doing things... your location class could expose a subscribe and unsubscribe method. All of the widgets where you're actually using the location call subscribe (which should also be stateful widgets) with a callback in their initState() and unsubscribe in their dispose(). The location class would simply call each of the callbacks instead of changing state as you're doing now, and within each of the callbacks you should call setState for the widget that actually shows the location.