Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

"Move up" and "Move down" support for nodes is provided by the NetBeans Platform, as described in this "NetBeans Definitive Guide" page on-line. I tried to get it to work for some of my child nodes today and managed to get it working, with Jarda's help. The menu items are enabled, if I select one child node at a time, and they work as one would expect them to: Let's say I define my children like this: public class PropChildren extends Index.ArrayChildren { @Override ...

Toni's photos, taken last week at the NetBeans Platform Certified Training in Wuerzburg. The training was delivered by Pavel Kotlov, David Strupl, Toni Epple, and myself. This course is offered for free to universities (and colleges and similar institutions), but only if the course is embedded within the existing curriculum of the class. (I.e, it should be taken seriously by everyone involved.) The course fits very well within an advanced Swing curriculum or within a...

Let's say you have one base application for all your customers. However, each customer has some user-specific settings that need to be distributed and installed in some way. Previously, i.e., in your pre NetBeans Platform days, you might have distributed an INI file (or some other config file) which was somehow read into the application to include the customizations. But now you're working with the NetBeans Platform. Is there specific support for this scenario or should you...

I spent the last week traveling around Germany. First there was a customer training (a customized version of the NetBeans Platform Certified Training) in Immenstadt, which is pretty much on the border with Austria and Switzerland. I spent two days there with Petr Suchomel, a NetBeans engineering manager, giving a two day NetBeans Platform course to 5 engineers. It was an interesting time (and most of my recent blog entries are based on remaining questions that were...

Let's say you want the toolbar to be on the right side of your application. Let's also say that you want the icons to be larger than 16x16 or 24x24. At the same time, you want to use the NetBeans Actions system, so you can't simply create a TopComponent and then put buttons on the TopComponent. How to solve this problem? Use Lookup! Here's how the result looks for me: First, I removed all the existing toolbars, by simply adding this to the layer: <file...

I made a lot of progress with node serialization. Now, when I start up my application, I see ALL of the following selected: The above are selected, without me doing anything at start up, because those were the ones I had selected at the time the application shut down. Hence, I serialized ALL the selected nodes. Before, I only managed to work with a single selection, instead of the multiple selection you see above, because I hadn't figured out how to iterate over my handles...

There are many ways to customize a NetBeans Platform application's title in the title bar. Below, I try to list all of them, together with all related references. One typical added requirement is that the title should change dynamically, upon selection of something different in the application. For example, in the IDE the current project's name appears in the IDE's title bar. That's also quite easy to do. import org.openide.modules.ModuleInstall;public class Installer...

By default, the NetBeans window system restores the application's customized layout, i.e., window position and size, when the application restarts (assuming the user directory hasn't been deleted). For example, even though the Projects window in the IDE is in the explorer mode, the user can move it to the properties mode. Then, when the application shuts down, the last position (and size) of the window is serialized (i.e., stored) on disk, in the user directory. When the...

In Convert your TopComponent to a MultiViewElement I explained, in the first part of that blog entry, how to open a file represented by a node in an explorer view into a TopComponent (instead of into the Source Editor, where a file opens by default). Basically, as described in that blog entry, you need to extend org.openide.loaders.OpenSupport and implement org.openide.cookies.OpenCookie and org.openide.cookies.CloseCookie. Not very nice code, but it works perfectly. However,...