Chapter 3. Creating JFace Viewers

JFace – the Eclipse model/view/controller architecture

In the last chapter, we looked at the basic building blocks of SWT, which provide a glue layer between the native operating system's widgets and Java. We will now look at JFace, which builds upon SWT to provide an MVC architecture as well as many of the common widgets used by Eclipse.

In this chapter, we shall:

  • Create a view for showing hierarchical data
  • Use image, font, and color resources
  • Generate styled text
  • Sort and filter entries in viewers
  • Add double-click actions
  • Create a view for showing tabular data
  • Synchronize selections between views

Why JFace?

While SWT provides generic implementations for basic widgets (such as trees, buttons, labels, and so on), these often work at a level that deals with strings and responds to selection by integer index. To make it easier to display structured content, JFace provides several viewers that provide combinations of SWT widgets and event managers to provide a UI for structured content.

There are many types of viewer—which are all subclasses of Viewer—but the most common ones are ContentViewer subclasses such as TreeViewer and TableViewer. There are also text-based viewers such as TextViewer and SourceViewer, as well as operational views such as DetailedProgressViewer for the Progress view. In this chapter, we will create views based on TreeViewer and TableViewer. Since JFace is based on SWT (described in Chapter 2, Creating Views with SWT), knowing how SWT works is essential to understand how JFace is used.

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