This lesson delves further into executing HTTP requests to fetch movie data and organize code for better readability.

Modularizing code

Let’s move the getJson() method in its own class, say MoviesProvider. This keeps related code together.

All images in TMDB are hosted in a common location. We’ll use the imagePathPrefix variable to hold this path in the MoviesProvider class. Since this path doesn’t change and should be accessible from other classes, it should be final and static.

The imagePathPrefix is the path to image storage. Each movie carries its own unique poster path in the poster_path attribute. Combining the value of imagePathPrefix and poster_path will give the full path for the image resource.

class MoviesProvider {
 static final String imagePathPrefix = 'https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w500/';

 static Future<Map> getJson() async {
   //API Key. Don't forget to replace it with your own key.
   final apiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY";
   
   //URL to fetch movies by their popularity
   final apiEndPoint =
       "http://api.themoviedb.org/3/discover/movie?api_key=${apiKey}&sort_by=popularity.desc";

   //Response returned from API/Server
   final apiResponse = await http.get(apiEndPoint);

   //Parsing to JSON using dart:convert
   return json.decode(apiResponse.body); 
 }
}