How to handle java.util.Properties when using eclipse data binding - eclipse

Question

I have a model class, it contains a java.util.Properties.
public class Model{
private Properties properties;
}
This properties can contains arbitrary key-value pairs. Now I want to bind "properties" to a JFace TableViewer. How to do this?
Some example code will be good, I have googled for this, but found nothing useful.

Answer 1

To access your model from a TableViewer you have to provide a LabelProvider and a ContentProvider as a translation to the TableViewer and of course provide the model itself.
In short the ContentProvider wraps your models content to the structure of the TableViewer (basically a breakdown of your model to the line by line approach of the TableViewer).
The LabelProvider lets you control the actual rendering in the TableCells.
To provide your model the TableViewer supplies a setInput method.
This works best however when your model is modeled as a JavaBean.
If you look at the snippets you will find something like this in your implementation of the ContentProvider like here:
public Object[] getElements(Object inputElement) {
return (MyModel[]) inputElement;
}
So, if your model as I understand right now, is just a wrapper around your properties, one way to achieve your goal would be to introduce the notion of a PropertyLine that gets populated either by startup, or dynamically via JFace Databinding (that might be a different topic).
public class Model{
...
private PropertyLine[] propertyLineArray;
private PropertyLine[] initializeProperties(){
//initialize your PropertyLines
}
public Model(){
...
propertyLineArray=initializeProperties();
...
}
public PropertyLine[] getPropertyLines(){
return propertyLineArray;
}
}
public class ProperyLine{
...
private String propertyKey;
private String propertyText;
//getter, setter
...
}
Your ContentProvider would look something like this:
private class PropertyContentProvider implements IStructuredContentProvider {
...
public Object[] getElements(Object inputElement) {
return (PropertyLine[]) inputElement;
}
...
}
Your LabelProvider seems quite straightforward then:
public class PropertyLabelProvider extends LabelProvider implements
ITableLabelProvider {
...
public String getColumnText(Object element, int columnIndex) {
PropertyLine pl=(PropertyLine) element
return pl.getPropertyText();
}
...
}
You wire everything up somewhere by:
final TableViewer v = new TableViewer(shell, SWT.BORDER
| SWT.FULL_SELECTION);
v.setLabelProvider(new PropertyLabelProvider());
v.setContentProvider(new PropertyContentProvider ());
v.setInput(myModel.getPropertyLines());