I have a Wizard with two pages: pageone extending WizardNewProjectCreationPage, and pagetwo is extending WizardPage. I want the user to be able to create the project first, and then add files to the project on the second page.
For the latter I want to use a SWT Table (?) like when you pick an interface in the Java Class Wizard in Eclipse IDE (cf. picture here). Also the "Add" button next to it.
How can I achieve this? Do I have to use Eclipse Forms API for this? Or simply add a SWT Table? I have used the Plug-In Spy but the source code given in NewClassWizardPage and NewTypeWizardPage seems to be very specific to this example and I cannot make sense of it.
I've also had a look at vogella's tutorial for JFace table, but I can't get my head around it.
Just some basic steps would be great, or maybe somebody has done this before?
I can easily understand why you're confused... there are indeed many ways to do this. You even left out Data Binding which provides you with yet another way to populate and decorate the table in question.
To sum up the usage of the different APIs:
SWT provides the basic widgets and controls. Often these have a rather irregular low-level interface - especially compared with Swing - but you need to access the SWT controls to lay them out (an exercise that can be complicated in itself). Also many of the listeners are on the controls.
JFace provides a set of viewers on top of the corresponding structured SWT controls - e.g. TableViewer on top of Table. These viewers provides a high-level interface to the functionality of the underlying control - e.g. with models, label providers, sorting, filtering and more. (The viewers can easily be compared with the Swing counterparts...)
Eclipse Forms provides a (relatively) simple way to create views, dialogs, etc that looks like web pages. Examples of this are the various PDE editors.
Data Binding provides a (somewhat complicated) way to bind controls (including Tables) to a data structure (Bean, EMF or POJO based).
So... you have to decide on whether to use the model facet of JFace and Data Binding, but the rest of the APIs are often combined in the same view or dialog.
NewClassWizardPage and NewTypeWizardPage are both particular complicated examples of wizards - don't base your own work on these!
For your particular case - as I understand it - I would use a simple JFace TableViewer to hold the list of interfaces... (I use a TableViewer rather than a ListViewer as the later cannot have an image as part of the label provider.) The "Add" and "Remove" buttons will manipulate the model of the viewer and then update the viewer. You don't need Eclipse Forms as the wizards usually don't look like web pages. And Data Binding is also an overkill here given the very, very simple data for the wizard.
Please note that the function of a wizard is only performed after all the wizard pages has been shown and the "Finish" button is pressed.
Related
I wanna to use Camunda Modeler to create a complicated form cards for User Tasks consist about 20-30-50 fields divided in several tabs. Many cards will contain the same fields and fields groups. I wanna to have an ability to create and reuse fields groups or somewhat liked on fields groups. How can organize process with Modeler? What is the appropriate template? Or maybe you can recommend another tool?
I have a variant of template, but it's not clear for me now. The complicated form will be divided into several tabs. For example the card consists in 2 Tabs: Tab1 and Tab2. Then I can suppose that the card with active Tab1 is one state of the card, and the same card with active Tab2 - the another state. And then I can configure a scenario for each tab and transitions between tabs. Does it look believable?
Apparently, there are no standard solutions of such kind of issue. I'm going to make an integration form.io formBuilder into Camunda modeler instead standard form constructor. Maybe it looks madly, but I'm sure - it would be working. The formio has angular implementation of the constructor and modeler is based on the electron technologies. There are looks the same, and integration is not imagine as great headache. I hope. But I need a lot of time to do this.
We created our own framework with Scala / Play and Semantic-UI (Here you can use whatever technology you like).
You model the user form in the Camunda Modeler, using additional properties to describe the 'special' components, like File Upload, Field Grouping, Number Field, Radio Buttons etc.
We use then Play Templates / Semantic-UI to implement the generic Forms.
So in our implementation we use the defined properties to generate them in the Form.
So for example you can provide a property width. This value we use for the Semantic-UI layout which allows widths 1 to 16. So you have a simple possibility to have more than one component in one row.
I am attempting to build a simple application using wicket and have been impressed so far. I have been taking advantage of the Component class to determine behavior of elements on the page based on user input or the model. I see the component model similarities with JSF, but find the wicket lifecycle easier to manage.
What i haven't been able to understand is having to add every component to the tree for every wicket:id mentioned on a page, especially for ones without any children. it seems heavy handed to have to build up the tree in java code when the tree has already been somewhat defined within the markup. what am i missing?
edit
I should probably give an example. I have a label for an input box that in some cases i want to be able to modify. 95% of the time the text and attributes i have for the label in markup will be fine.
Short answer: Yes, you have to add them.
Long answer: You can create custom code to do this, but I doubt it's worth the effort.
With JSF, you use a non-html tag, which has one component type associated to it - for example, h:inputText correspond to the class HtmlInputText -, so it knows what class to instantiate.
With Wicket, the HTML file contains only (with a few exceptions) HTML tags, and you have to instantiate a concrete component for each wicket:id-marked tag you add to the markup, because it can't know for sure if <span wicket:id='xyz'> means a Label, a FeedbackPanel, a WebMarkupContainer, or some custom component.
With JSF you do in the markup what, with Wicket, you do in Java code, that is, to build the component tree, bind components to properties, and handle events. It keeps everything in one file (you don't have to create a class for every template file), which has many, many cons (some may think it has some pros, I digress).
You page is never just a simple form that does nothing. You want to convert and validate the input, you want to process the submit, you want to update components using Ajax. With JSF, you do all that in the (non-compilable, type-unsafe, poorly tooled, non-refactorable) template, making it bloated with expressions, configuration tags, and - gawd forbid - business logic.
If Wicket had support for this (and, for the matter, it has the flexibility needed for you to build this add-on yourself), you would have to add lots of extra annotations (special, non-standard tags and attributes) to the markup, to declare what class to instantiate, what model to update, what validations to execute, etc., compromising two of the beauties of the framework, the clean HTML template, and the clear separation between visuals and logic.
One framework that tries to do more in the template, while remaining less bloated than JSF (which isn't that hard anyway) is Apache Tapestry. But as can be seen in its tutorial, you still end up having to use non-standard tags and following arbitrary conventions to bind the template to the code (you may like it, but if this is the case you have baaad taste, sorry :P).
I have a label for an input box that in some cases i want to be able to modify. 95% of the time the text and attributes i have for the label in markup will be fine.
You could try to wrap the content of the label in a Model, enclose that label in a container and repaint the container (target.add(container);).
Offcurse you should add them.One of the most powerful facilities of wicket is that allow you to make a reusable components espacially html components.
There are a million ways to build a house, but most people wouldn’t
consider building toilets, bathtubs, and glass windows from scratch.
Why build a toilet yourself when you can buy one for less money than
it would cost you to construct it, and when it’s unlikely you’ll
produce a better one than you can get in a shop? In the same fashion,
most software engineers try to reuse software modules. “Make or buy”
decisions encompass more than whether a module is available;
generally, reusing software modules is cheaper and leads to more
robust systems. Reusing software also means you don’t have to code the
same functionality over and over again.(wicket in action:manning)
So to have a reusable wicket pages, wicket just needs a html page to show it's components hierarchy or their positions. The types and model of these components left to programmer.
I'm investigating Adobe CQ5 and would like any advice on how to integrate its drag-and-drop UI to create a responsive website. It seems as if it works on a concept of fairly bland templates with components that can be dropped in pretty much anywhere, including things like "three-column control" - which would make designing a responsive grid structure very hard (as it would be hard to prevent users from dropping in a control that could ruin the layout).
Does anyone have any experience or advice on this? I'm really looking for deep technical details on the structure of templates vs components (paragraphs), and where/how to manage to the CSS.
CQ5 offers ways to control what can be done within a template, so thinking that components "can be dropped in pretty much anywhere" may be misleading. Page templates are designed and configured so that you control which components can be added to a certain area of a page. This allows you to only make those components available that will work with the template layout, excluding components that would wreck the layout. Then authors are only allowed to use things that will work. If they attempt to drag a component onto a paragraph (parsys) where that component has not been configured as available, the UI will not allow them to use it there. So CQ actually makes it easy to prevent users from dropping a control somewhere that would ruin the layout.
This is outlined a bit here:
http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/howto/components_develop.html#Adding%20a%20new%20component%20to%20the%20paragraph%20system%20%28design%20%20%20%20%20mode%29 which states that
"The components can be activated (or deactivated) to determine which
are offered to the author when editing a page."
When it comes to CSS and JavaScript, you can create a client library and then include the relevant client library on the page. Backend CQ functionality will take care of combining multiple CSS (or JavaScript) files into a single minified file to allow for a single HTTP request of an optimized file. This it outlined a bit here:
http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/developing/widgets.html#Including%20the%20Client-Sided%20Code%20in%20a%20Page as well as
http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/howto/taglib.html#%3Ccq:includeClientLib%3E
So you might develop several components that share a client library, then when any of the components is added to a paragraph the client library will be included on the page. You may also want a CSS library that applies to all the templates to give a common look and feel, yet allow components to add their own when they are used.
These guidelines for using templates and components outline how you provide control, yet flexibility:
http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/5-5/developing/developing_guidelines_bestpractices.html#Guidelines%20for%20Using%20Templates%20and%20Components
I'll document our successful WIP experience with RWD and CQ5
Assumptions:
A well documented style guide.
Our First Steps:
Modified existing column control component css to utilize twitter bootstrap grid css.
Create a base page property allowing two different classes on the grid container to be set and inherited by child pages. (container||container-fluid).
Leverage out-of-the-box components where ever possible.
All component widths inherit the width of their parent container allowing for components to be dropped into any location within a template.
Issues:
The out-of-the-box column control component can not be nested.
We are looking into building a custom column control component.
Takeaways: this is an evolutionary project and we are constantly iterating.
With the recent launch of AEM 6.0, they have an example website called as Geomatrixx Media. This website is responsive.
You can take this example as reference and start building on top of it.
in my RCP - Project i'm using eclipse databinding to connect the ui with the backend. I want every change in an open editor to be undoable. My Domainmodell and UI are seperated in two different plugins.
My current approach is to implement my own UpdateValueStrategy class for the databinding. I extend the normal UpdateValueStrategy and override the doSet Methode.
From there i get the OperationHistory and the Global UndoContext, then i create a new Operation. I have various Operations like "ChangeCustomerName" and "ChangeCustomerNote".
Questions:
Do i need to implement the undo/redo - logic by my own, or is the framework somehow supporting my with this?
Is there a better place or way to create the undoable Operation then the doSet() of the UpdateValue - Strategy class. To access the textfield, which was changed is not to easy.
The answer you will get mostly is: Use EMF.Edit, it includes it out of the box with org.eclipse.emf.databinding.edit and there's an excellent tutorial on the net.
There is an open feature request in the Eclipse bugtracker about including undo/redo also in JFace databinding without EMF but it's not finished yet. It has also be discussed in the eclipse forum.
I am looking for a nice framework for developing a GUI builder Application. We have an application where 100Os of custom data entry forms and their print formats are required and each client will need some modifications on these. We have a developed a product using java based open source templatnig frameworks so that the layout and field definition are stored in database and rendered dynamically to the user. We also have an appication to design these forms but cannot do visual design.
Now I am trying to make a Visual Form Designer application for generating these forms. Can any one suggest some open source frameworks than can be used? Can I use Eclipse Visual Editor? Or is it better to develop some kind of parser for HTML using AntLR and then parse the HTML output from already existing GUI builders like Dreamweaver to get the desired output?
Thanks and Regards,
-- Kannan
Oooh, great question!
I wouldn't know any readily availble framework that you can use. Depending on your needs however, I think rolling your own shouldn't be too hard.
First of all, you probably wouldn't want to give the users too much freedom. Freedom only gives them the opportunity to mess things up and make the resultant forms hard to use. I think from your description that the fields are pre-defined, so that the user only needs to customize which fields appear on a given form, and in what order. Order can be a simple thing like top-to-bottom. Some semi-intelligent automatic layouting could be used to conserve screen space. Adding a feature to group fields together would probably also be useful, and grouping would lead to some kind of standard "group" widget.
Accepting simplified functionality like this, you don't really need the flexibility of a full gui editor. A couple of listviews, maybe a property sheet and a preview window will be enough to give your users the functionality they need.
Of course, this only holds for screen forms. Print forms may be trickier to layout, as people may want to cram as many fields as possible into very little space so the entire form can fit on a single page or something. I really don't have any suggestions for you there, but maybe a similar "simplified" approach with some intelligent auto-layouting could work.
Overall, my advice would be: Keep It Simple! (S... ;)