Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Let's start by looking at some screenshots. We have a normal viewer/editor scenario, with the viewer window in one module and the editor window in the other. The point of this blog entry is to look at the toolbar button (there's only one in each screenshot, so no confusion there). In the first screenshot, the toolbar button is enabled, because I have put a "Customer" object into the Lookup of the Node, which causes the toolbar button to be enabled because the underlying...

Some more fun with PropertyPanels (and MigLayout): Code: public class BicycleNode extends BeanNode { private PropertyPanel itemPP; private TopComponent tc = new TopComponent(); public BicycleNode(BicycleItem item) throws IntrospectionException { super(item, Children.LEAF, Lookups.singleton(item)); setDisplayName(item.getName()); } @Override public Action getPreferredAction() { return new OpenDetailsAction(); } public class...

Kind of cool to learn that when you use java.awt.Color as one of the fields in your POJO, that you can do this in your TopComponent: OutlineView ov = new OutlineView("Cars");ov.getOutline().setRootVisible(false);ov.setPropertyColumns( "year","Year", "color","Color" );add(ov, BorderLayout.CENTER); And then you'll have the color chooser available as the field's editor when you run the application:

Validation of a form in a NetBeans Platform application. First some pics: How to do it? Wrap the "ide/modules/ext/ValidationAPI.jar", i.e., from your NetBeans IDE installation, into your application. Extend the palette by right-clicking it, choosing Palette Manager, then "Add from JAR", then browsing to the above API and selecting the "ValidationPanel". Drag it from the palette and drop it on your TopComponent, where it will be named "validationPanel1" by default. Then add this...

Let's create a modular multiview component. The assumption is that you want to decouple the views in a multiview component from each other, each being provided by different contributors, potentially. To get started, set up a multiview component as described in the File Type Integration Tutorial. Next, let's put one tab of the multiview in one module, with the second tab in a second module. In the first module's layer: <folder name="multiviews"> <file...

Work done for the French Ministry of Defence on the NetBeans Platform was mentioned here in this blog less than a year ago. I've been trying to follow that project, ASTRAD ("architecture and simulation tool for radar analysis and design"), ever since then. I came across several articles recently relating to this project. One of them, entitled "Use of ASTRAD Simulation Tool in Radar modes development", describes ASTRAD in quite some detail. In it, ASTRAD is defined as "a...

Let's now make the application more realistic and, in fact, simpler. This time we'll have a new window for each car, with Save functionality enabled/disabled on the Node as well as the TopComponent: The car object is unchanged, i.e., the same as before: public class Car { String type; String color; public String getColor() { return color; } public void setColor(String color) { this.color = color; } public String getType() { return...

Now we'll synchronize the Node with the TopComponent, enable the Save functionality, and serialize/deserialize. Many thanks to Urs Bill and Tom Wheeler for their input in the last days. Here's a pic to capture the concept of what I'd like to achieve: Regardless of whether the Node in the explorer view or the TopComponent is selected, the Save functionality should be enabled or disabled, depending on the state of the underlying object. Here's the Car object: public class Car { ...

The next step of our car designer is an extension of the section "Opening the File into a Window", from the NetBeans File Type Integration Tutorial. We can now also nicely deal with a question I received yesterday from Urs Bill from Switzerland (from a team of developers working on Berne's public transportation system, which is also based on the NetBeans Platform): "In your tutorial in the class AbcOpenSupport you create a new AbcTopComponent, set its displayName to...