Bean reader JTable

I have already written about JTable on this blog, a lot can be written about it.
This time I will talk about a custom jtable I developed in order to have the simplest way to show READ ONLY data.

First how I was coding before:

class Person{
String firstName;
String lastName;
/*..*/
}

DefaultTableModel dtm= new DefaultTableModel();
for(Person p: getListPersons()){
Dtm.add(new Object[]{p.getFirstName(),p.getLastName()});
}

Dtm.addColumn(“firstName”);
Dtm.addColumn(“lastName”);

JTable table=new JTable();
table.setModel(dtm);

And to know which Object is currently selected:

Int index=table.getSelectedIndex();
Int modelIndex=table.convertRowIndexToModel(index);
Person selected=getListPersons.get(modelIndex);

After coding this way too many time I wondered:
As we only show only one kind of object in the table, wouldn’t it be easier:
to have a table of T
to be able to add/remove a T
to be able to get the selected T
All this without coding a custom JTable or/and TableModel each time


So the plan is to have an easy way to
-Define the class of objects to show using the JTable
-Define the columns
-Add/remove an object from the table
-Get the selected objects


So now let’s see the implementation I called BeanReaderJTable

First we need a generic parameter

public class BeanReaderJTable<T> extends JTable {/*…*/}

The contructor take the field names and the column names you want as header value.

public BeanReaderJTable(String[] fields, String[] title)

Adding/removing a row or getting the selected objects can’t be easier:

addRow(T)
addRow(T[])
addRow(Collection<T>)
removeRow(T)
getSelectedObject():T
getSelectedObjects():T[]

What is doing the actual job is the GenericTableModel.
The important job is done in getValueAt(int,int). The reflexion API is used to retrieve the value of a given pair field+row


Now let’s see a sample:


// declare the type + fields+column title

String[] fields = new String[] { "size", "size.width", "size.height", "class", "visible", null };
String[] titles = new String[] { "size", "width", "height", "class", "is visible", null };
BeanReaderJTable<Component> table = new BeanReaderJTable<Component>(fields, titles);
//populate the table
table.addRow(getAllComponents(frame));

You may have noticed, I left the last field empty, doing so, an empty column is created that can be used to set for example a button cell editor

And also what you can see, is that you can access nested field like size.width

This time you should actually be able to access the code source repository, my java.net project has been approved:
BeanReaderJTable

Closing windows in style

This week some fun stuff!

In the post about dialog with drop shadow i mentioned the class WindowFadeInManager to open or close a window with a fadein / fadeout effect, but there is another way to close window in style.

First, don’t make me say what I didn’t, such close transitions should not be used on every windows in your app, if you do it will just annoy the user.
I usually use them to close loading/splash/main frame of an application.



The base class where all the main work is done is
CloseTransition , it’s an abstract class where the only abstract method is

protected abstract void paintImage(Graphics g,float animFraction);

This method is responsible of drawing the closing window for a given animation fraction (from 0 to 1)

The CloseTransition class take care of making a screenshot of the actual window that will get closed. Then it starts the close animation.

So what to do in this paintImage method?
One easy thing is to show that a window is closing via shapes. For example simply by making the window shrink.

This is done by extending the ShapeTransition class.
This class has one abstract method:

public abstract Shape getShape(float animFraction);

This method will get called to set the clip before painting the image of the closing window. There is also an option to automaticly shrink the image of the closing screen.
So to create a close transition, this method will have to return an empty shape when animFraction=1 and a shape that cover totally the original window when animFraction=0

By default in the ShapeTransition the original window is painted with an alpha value of 1-animfraction to make the window disappear smoothly, you can change this behaviour by setting the fadeout property to false.

In the repository you will find the following implementation of close transitions:
ShrinkTransition
CircleTransition
RectanglesTransition (the one I use in my apps)
FadeOutTransition
RotationTransition
PinchTransition, the funniest one, only work well on small window


To start a close transition you can follow this example:

myFrame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.DO_NOTHING_ON_CLOSE);
myFrame.addWindowListener(new WindowAdapter() {
@Override
public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
RectanglesTransition transition = new RectanglesTransition(myFrame);
transition.startCloseTransition();
}
});

By default the action at the end of the transition is system.exit(0); because those close transitions are meant to be used to close main frame of an application but anyway you can set the end action:

transition.setEndAction(AbstractAction);

Moving to java.dev.net

As kenai is closing i am moving my code repository to https://free-the-pixel.dev.java.net


edit:
here is the mail i got a few hours after migrating to java.net :


In an effort to get information out to the Kenai community quickly, while trying to manage the integration of our two companies, I think we did a poor job at communicating our plans for Kenai.com to you. I would like to remedy that now. Our strategy is simple. We don't believe it makes sense to continue investing in multiple hosted development sites that are basically doing the same thing. Our plan is to shut down kenai.com and focus our efforts on java.net as the hosted development community. We are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology. This means that any project currently hosted on kenai.com will be able to continue as you are on java.net. We are still working out the technical details, but the goal is to make this migration as seamless as possible for the current kenai.com projects. So in the meantime I suggest that you stay put on kenai.com and let us work through the details and get back to you later this month.

Thanks for your feedback and patience.

Ted Farrell
Oracle Corporation


that's great news,
well i did the manual migrating to java.net but i won't complain i didn t have so many stuff as i only started begining on this years.