Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Today, an interesting development in this series—the integration of a link check feature. To do this, I first changed the 'Display' and 'Design' toggle buttons to 'Outline' and 'Link Check'. Then in the TopicPanel constructor, let the code branch in different directions, depending on the value of the display property, which was discussed yesterday: if (display == 0) { utils.createHyperlinkHierarchy(dObj, toc, panel);} else { linkCheckProcess();} The linkCheckProcess() m...

In step 5 of part 4, we have this method: public List iterateThroughOneLevel(Tocitem item, GridBagConstraints gbc) { String name = item.getText(); String target = item.getTarget(); if (isTopic(target)) { addButtToView(name, target, gbc); //addFieldToView(name, gbc); } else { addLabToView(name, gbc); } return item.getTocitem();} The method adds a link for each toc item that has a target attribute. However, the alternative is commented...

The linkButtonPressed method is invoked when a LinkButton is pressed. What we want to happen at that point is... the related help topic should open! That way, someone working on the helpset has a central place from which to open all the topics and edit them. Extremely handy. But how to do it? Every toc item that we have identified as such, because of the presence of a 'target' attribute, looks similar to this in the XML file: <tocitem text="Refactoring an Enterprise Bean"...

In this part, we look at one way of pulling all the elements from the TOC and then we display them in the visual pane of our multiview editor. In doing so, we distinguish between toc items that have the 'target' attribute set and those that don't. If there is no 'target' attribute set, one can assume that the item is not a help topic, because it doesn't have an associated HTML page. Therefore, it must be a 'bucket' or container. And therefore one should make a distinction...

I got slightly carried away while preparing for the third part of this series—as a result, I seem to have created a mostly complete JavaHelp Editor. Below, you see four buttons in the top of the visual view, one is for the XML source of the JavaHelp TOC file, while the other three are the names of the highest elements in the TOC hierarchy. When you click one of the buttons, you get a list of topics, but only those that relate (i.e., are below in the hierarchy) to the name in...

Let's continue exactly where we left off yesterday. Yesterday's end result was an absolutely minimal visual editor framework. Today we'll build on top of that, a little bit, so that we'll end up with a slightly more complex visual view on top of TOC XML files. At the end of this blog entry, when you open any TOC file (which must conform to the MIME resolver constraints that we set yesterday), a visual view will open on top of the XML source view. It will look like this: Only...

This is the first of what promises to be a multi-part draft tutorial, at the end of which you will (hopefully) have a working multiview editor for XML files. I say 'hopefully', because I haven't actually got to a successful end point yet, myself. So, potentially, this tutorial will come to an abrupt end three weeks from now, when I throw my hands in the air and say 'I give up!'. But I doubt that. Somehow or another everything should come together somewhere along the line. At...

In the last day or so, Girish Patil, the engineer responsible for the (brand new!) JAXB tooling in NetBeans IDE 6.0, integrated some handy code templates. If you type 'jaxbm' in the editor, and you then press Tab to expand the abbreviation, a snippet of JAXB marshalling code is generated, with some of the variables automatically filled in, based on the code available around the invocation of the template. Similarly, when you type 'jaxbu', you'll get a snippet of JAXB...

Made some progress but still quite a long way to go. Below you see an XML file that conforms to the Palette Editor Item DTD, which is the DTD that defines the XML files that are used to display items in the palette. For example, the HTML code snippets in NetBeans IDE are defined by means of this XML file. Of course, a visual view for this XML file is completely superfluous, because one would never edit these by hand. A developer would let the user perform actions to generate...