Group items tagged

If you start thinking about the different kinds of viewers you can create you’ll see that most of them behave in the same way. Whether you display your list of boolean values (in this case) as a single select listbox (with one value being true at a time) or as a group of radio buttons or as a multiselect list (all selected are true) or as a group of check boxes the only thing separating the class ListBoxViewer from GroupViewer (for lack of a better name) would be what widgets they choose to use. They can both inherit SelectableListViewer which holds most of the logic and a setMultiSelect(boolean enabled) method. Later on when you want to create a table with a check box on each row that selects the row for some future action it’s just more of the same old.

So you have a ListBoxViewer that holds the listBox and has a getWidget() to give the widget to your panel.The viewer takes an instance of the interface ListBoxFormat in its constructor. The format implementation has a getValue(E element) that returns the value to display in the llistbox. The viewer has the required methods to set the values of the listbox and get a list of the currently selected values and so on. Probably along the way of what you’re planning to do next. By using viewers and formats you can do the same thing for other widgets like tables as well. So populating a table with values is as easy as tableViewer.setSource(aListOfTableRowObjects) where the objects in the list can by of any type that you can write a TableFormat for (with a getColumnValue(int column, E element) method). GlazedLists does this for the desktop (Swing and SWT/JFace). The cool thing there is that the viewer is aware of changes to the actual input list outside of the viewer, I don’t think that’s possible in GWT yet

the constructor uses an EnumTranslator to populate the labels in the ListBox. This allows you to use a standard GWT ConstantsWithLookup inteface to supply localized text for the enum values instead of the constant names. ConstantsWithLookup is just like Constants, but with the important ability to find a value dynamically without invoking a method corresponding to the property name.