How should a Flutter app properly validate and sanitize any data received from a server, rather than blindly and unconditionally trusting that all incoming data is genuinely already safe and well formed?

Even though a properly secured backend server should itself already be performing thorough input validation, a genuinely well built Flutter app should still validate and appropriately handle any data it actually receives back from that server, since a genuine bug on the backend, a partially corrupted response, or a specific malicious actor who somehow gains the ability to directly manipulate network traffic could all still potentially deliver malformed or genuinely unexpected data, and defensively checking for missing required fields or unexpected specific data types before actually using that received data helps prevent a resulting crash or a more subtle, genuinely incorrect application behavior.

final userData = jsonDecode(response.body);
final name = userData['name'] as String? ?? 'Unknown';