SWT Tree with columns - resizing columns by dragging line - eclipse

I have a multi-column tree that I really don't want to show column headers (they provide no valuable information in my case and make the layout unnecessarily busy). Unfortunately, I really need to have resizable columns.
How can I make the columns resizable by dragging lines between them?

SWT uses native widgets and this isn't native behavior (at least on platforms that I am familiar with), so there is no built-in mechanism in SWT for doing what you are after. You should be able to simulate this yourself by tracking mouse events, managing the mouse cursor and calling TreeColumn.setWidth() when appropriate.

Related

Scroll a panel using drag and drop gwt

I am trying to scroll a panel by mouse. I looked over drag and drop and I can`t figure out if it is possible using drag events to scroll a panel or is it better using mouse move event, mouse over and mouse out etc.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
Although modern GWT supports DnD, its implementation is not so good, so it is better that you select one 3party library for that. You have gwt-dnd or gwtquery-dnd-plugin. IMO the second one is easier to use and much more powerful.
But I dont think DnD can help you to move the scroll, since it is designed to move all the draggable element and drop over another one.
Maybe what you need is something similar to the scrollwidget in mgwt, it is designed for mobile devices, but it has an implementation for desktop, so hopefully you could either use the library or copy the approach to your implementation.
Just in case you will use gwtquery, keep in mind that it's out of date. So, you will need to put the newest jquery and jquery-ui libraries into the corresponding jar and edit the gwt.xml files accordingly. It's not a big deal, but otherwise you would put your code under the risk of misfunction in newer browsers. By the way, it depends on the usage you would make of jquery-like functionality.

How to implement a image list control with SWT?

Does anybody have any idea on how to easily implement a image list(like the windows explorer with medium icons) control with swt? it seems like that it could be done easily with CListCtrl in c++ on windows, but does not seem to be easy with swt? any hints are appreciated!
Up to me, you need to create your own widget (check e.g. http://www.snip2code.com/Snippet/11489/Custom-SWT-List-Box) and add composite items to your custom list.
If vertical-only scrolling is enough, I suggest you rely on a single column TableViewer. This is what I did in a project where I needed a gallery-like window allowing the user to pick a graphical component based on displayed thumbnails.
You just need to implement the proper TableLabelProvider.getColumnImage and return the desired thumbnail corresponding to your list entry.
That gives a pretty decent list-like rendering.
In addition, TableViewer API is very well documented.

How to merge table cells in Eclipse RCP Table control?

My question is: I've an Eclipse RCP table in my view. The table has gridlines Visible and everything is fine. But I want all the cells of first row of the table to be merged as a single row in run-time GUI. How can I achieve this functionality ? Please, I don't expect something like adding a text over the first row obstructing it. If any API level functionality or any clues to do this are welcome.
The swt table is a native widget and does not allow you any span, neither in columns nor in rows. Even OwnerDraw (custom cell rendering) does not support this. The only way I see that could allow you to achieve this kind of hack is the swt table editor which allows you to place controls above cells:
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/snippets/#tableeditor
The table editor tracks the position of single cells and positions controls above them. It hides controls when a cell is not in edit mode, show's them when the cell is in edit mode. You'd have to deactivate this default behavior and make sure the controls are always shown - this should be fairly easy.
The more challenging part would be that you'd have to find out how to place the controls above 2 or more (and not a single) cells.
The only swt control I know to support span is the nebula grid. Grid is a custom control (no native widget) and therefore offers far more possibilites.
http://eclipse.org/nebula/widgets/grid/grid.php
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/viewvc.cgi/org.eclipse.swt.nebula/org.eclipse.swt.nebula.snippets/src/org/eclipse/swt/nebula/snippets/grid/GridSnippet2.java?root=Technology_Project&view=co
u can use GC api to do the needs in table. u can span between two columns.
http://www.java2s.com/Tutorial/Java/0280__SWT/Maketextspanmultiplecolumns.htm

Rendering a Long Document on iPad

I'm implementing a document viewer with highlighting/annotation capabilities for a custom document format on iPad. The documents are kind of long (100 to 200 pages, if printed on paper) and I've had a hard time finding the right approach. Here are the requirments:
1) Basic rich-text styling: control of left/right margins. Control of font name, size, foreground/background color, and line spacing. Bold, italics, underline, etc.
2) Selection and highlighting of arbitrary text regions (not limited to paragraph boundaries, like in Safari/UIWebView).
3) Customization of the Cut/Copy/Paste popup (UIMenuController) This is one of the essential requirements of the app.
My first implementation was based on UIWebView. I just rendered the document as HTML with CSS for text styling. But I couldn't get the kind of text selection behavior I wanted (across paragraph boundaries) and the UIMenuController can't be customized from within UIWebView.
So I started working on a javascript approach, faking the device text-selection behavior using JQuery to trap touch events and dynamically modifying the DOM to change the background color of selected regions of text. I built a fake UIMenuController control as a hidden DIV, positioning it and unhiding it whenever there was an active selection region.
Not too shabby.
The main problem is that it's SLOOOOOOOW. Scrolling through the document is nice and quick, but dynamically changing the DOM is not very snappy. Plus, I couldn't figure out how to recreate the magnifier loupe, so my fake text-selection GUI doesn't look quite the same as the native implementation. Also, I haven't yet implemented the communication bridge between the javascript layer and the objective-c layer (where the rest of the app lives), but it was shaping up to be a huge hassle.
So I've been looking at CoreText, but there are precious few examples on the web. I spent a little time with this simple little demo:
http://github.com/jonasschnelli/I7CoreTextExample/
It shows how to use CoreText to draw an NSAttributedText string into a UIView. But it has its own problems: It doesn't implement text-selection behavior, and it doesn't present a UIMenuController, so I don't have any idea how to make that happen. And, more importantly, it tries to draw the entire document all at once, with significant performance degradations for long documents. My documents can have thousands of paragraphs, and less than 1% of the document is ever on screen at a time.
On the plus side, these documents already contain precise formatting information. I know the exact page-position of every line of text, so I don't need a layout engine.
Does anyone know how to implement this sort of view using CoreText? I understand that a full-fledged implementation is overkill for a question like this, but I'm looking for a good CoreText example with a few basic requirements:
1) Precise layout & formatting control (using the formatting metrics and text styles I've already calculated).
2) Arbitrary selection of text.
3) Customization of the UIMenuController.
4) Efficient recycling of resources for off-screen objects.
I'd be happy to implement my own recycling when text elements scroll off-screen, but wouldn't that require re-implementing UIScrollView?
I'm brand-new to iPhone development, and still getting used to Objective-C, but I've been working in other languages (Java, C#, flex/actionscript, etc) for more than ten years, so I feel confident in my ability to get the work done, if only I had a better feel for the iPhone SDK and the common coding patterns for stuff like this. Is it just me, or does the SDK documentation really suck?
Anyhow, thanks for your help!
Does your document have any semantic components other than each paragraph? If you already have some concept of sections or pages, I would recommend you render each one of those as an independent tablecell. It's pretty simple to create a tablecell that makes you forget you're actually looking at a UITableView. All you would need to do is override drawRect: and setSelected: and setHighlighted: and tah dah! No More cell dividers unless you want them. Furthermore you could do some nifty things by using a tableview as your base. If you defined sections in the UITableView then you could have a nifty header that scrolls along as you're paging through your document. Another thing you could do is add a "jump to section" bar / a bookmarks menu, and that way you don't have to provide selection across the boundaries of sections.
Massive copy paste blocks would be pretty painful on the system as well. Further, if you went through the trouble to provide this content you might not want to make it too easy for someone to copy it all at once... (Can't follow this line of thought more without more specifics on your project).
If you really do want to provide the copy paste options you could add buttons to each logical page or section that immediately selects and copies the whole section for the user's convenience. (Maybe with citation associated?)
I recommend you lookup the UITableViewCell UITableViewDelegate and UITableViewDataSource in the SDK docs as those pages will significantly help if you choose to use this suggestion.
Just two random observations:
Can you afford to create a paging interface? (As opposed to “endless scrolling”.) It looks like a paging interface would be a lot easier on system resources.
The UIActionBar is actually the UIMenuController class. The interface is a bit weird, as the menu is a singleton (wtf?), but I’m sure you’ll have no trouble figuring it out.
Hope that helps.
Here's a potential solution, but I don't know if it's crazy. Since I'm still so new to iPhone development, this might be a big no-no.
Anyhow, I had the idea to render each paragraph of the document (whose dimensions I've already precisely calculated) as a cell in a UITableView. Since UITableView already has mechanisms for cell recycling, I wouldn't have to implement that from scratch, and the document could be arbitrarily long without causing resource consumption problems.
Of course, I'd want to get rid of the line separators between cells, since I want the UI to look like a document instead of a table.
Or maybe I could render each page of the document (like a typical PDF, this is a paged-document format) as a table cell, and override the cell-separator graphic to look like a page boundary...
But would it be possible to get rid of the default touch behavior within the table, and instead implement text-selection on the table cell contents? Would it be completely impossible to implement text selection that crosses paragraph boundaries (between multiple table cells)?
The UIWebView is a good choise, but we need another application to pre render the pages percisely using each font and each style sheet and store the rendring information into a database table:
chapter_id int primary key,
startlocation int,
end location int,
fontsize int (or stylesheetname string)
Using JavaScript we can calculate how many words fit in a div with out scrolling.
UIWebView is good as it provide rich content and it has selection and highlighting behavior.
Hope this helps.

What are some SWT datagrids/tables?

I need to be able to display some data in Eclipse in a grid/table control... I need things like paging, multiple column sorting, column choosing, etc. There is an SWT Table and the Nebula project has a grid in alpha.
Does what I need exist? 3rd party maybe? Doesn't have to be free, we can pay for the functionality.
I haven't seen those features implemented in a reusable widget that I can think of, they are more application-level features.
Paging:
If you were to use the JFace-type viewers (SWT Table or Nebula Grid both support this style of MVC architecture, as do some others mentioned in this question), it should be possible to implement paging in the content provider, just by setting some custom offset into your dataset and then refreshing the grid.
Multiple Column Sorting:
You can do this, it just needs an implementation of the correct table sorting interface. You get passed two rows to compare, and you can compare whichever columns you like in the sorting algorithm. Again though, the interface for actually choosing which columns to sort is down to you.
Column Choosing:
This requires a grid control with cell selection. Nebula is one, SWT Table isn't. If cell selection is available, this is just a matter of catching the correct selection event (clicking on a header probably) and iterating over your rows to select the correct cells.
There is also a new "rising star" on the widget sky called "nattable 2.0". It is an opensource project and the development team is very responsive. You should take a look at nattable.org ...
You could use the facilities of table presentation offered by the BIRT plugin, that is if you are really advance table layout needs.
(source: theserverside.com)
(otherwise the classic SWT TableViewer offers already some of the feature you are after
(source: richclient2.eu) )