public interface PropertyEditor
PropertyEditor supports a variety of different kinds of ways of displaying and updating property values. Most PropertyEditors will only need to support a subset of the different options available in this API.
Simple PropertyEditors may only support the getAsText and setAsText methods and need not support (say) paintValue or getCustomEditor. More complex types may be unable to support getAsText and setAsText but will instead support paintValue and getCustomEditor.
Every propertyEditor must support one or more of the three simple display styles. Thus it can either (1) support isPaintable or (2) both return a non-null String[] from getTags() and return a non-null value from getAsText or (3) simply return a non-null String from getAsText().
Every property editor must support a call on setValue when the argument object is of the type for which this is the corresponding propertyEditor. In addition, each property editor must either support a custom editor, or support setAsText.
Each PropertyEditor should have a null constructor.
Modifier and Type | Method and Description |
---|---|
void |
addPropertyChangeListener(PropertyChangeListener listener)
Adds a listener for the value change.
|
String |
getAsText()
Gets the property value as text.
|
Component |
getCustomEditor()
A PropertyEditor may choose to make available a full custom Component
that edits its property value.
|
String |
getJavaInitializationString()
Returns a fragment of Java code that can be used to set a property
to match the editors current state.
|
String[] |
getTags()
If the property value must be one of a set of known tagged values,
then this method should return an array of the tags.
|
Object |
getValue()
Gets the property value.
|
boolean |
isPaintable()
Determines whether this property editor is paintable.
|
void |
paintValue(Graphics gfx,
Rectangle box)
Paint a representation of the value into a given area of screen
real estate.
|
void |
removePropertyChangeListener(PropertyChangeListener listener)
Removes a listener for the value change.
|
void |
setAsText(String text)
Set the property value by parsing a given String.
|
void |
setValue(Object value)
Set (or change) the object that is to be edited.
|
boolean |
supportsCustomEditor()
Determines whether this property editor supports a custom editor.
|
void setValue(Object value)
value
- The new target object to be edited. Note that this
object should not be modified by the PropertyEditor, rather
the PropertyEditor should create a new object to hold any
modified value.Object getValue()
boolean isPaintable()
void paintValue(Graphics gfx, Rectangle box)
If the PropertyEditor doesn't honor paint requests (see isPaintable) this method should be a silent noop.
The given Graphics object will have the default font, color, etc of the parent container. The PropertyEditor may change graphics attributes such as font and color and doesn't need to restore the old values.
gfx
- Graphics object to paint into.box
- Rectangle within graphics object into which we should paint.String getJavaInitializationString()
The code fragment should be context free and must be a legal Java expression as specified by the JLS.
Specifically, if the expression represents a computation then all classes and static members should be fully qualified. This rule applies to constructors, static methods and non primitive arguments.
Caution should be used when evaluating the expression as it may throw exceptions. In particular, code generators must ensure that generated code will compile in the presence of an expression that can throw checked exceptions.
Example results are:
2
new java.awt.Color(127,127,34)
java.awt.Color.orange
javax.swing.Box.createRigidArea(new
java.awt.Dimension(0, 5))
;
') to end the expression.String getAsText()
Returns null if the value can't be expressed as an editable string.
If a non-null value is returned, then the PropertyEditor should be prepared to parse that string back in setAsText().
void setAsText(String text) throws IllegalArgumentException
text
- The string to be parsed.IllegalArgumentException
String[] getTags()
Component getCustomEditor()
The higher-level code that calls getCustomEditor may either embed the Component in some larger property sheet, or it may put it in its own individual dialog, or ...
boolean supportsCustomEditor()
void addPropertyChangeListener(PropertyChangeListener listener)
PropertyChangeEvent
on all registered PropertyChangeListener
s,
specifying the null
value for the property name
and itself as the source.listener
- the PropertyChangeListener
to addvoid removePropertyChangeListener(PropertyChangeListener listener)
listener
- the PropertyChangeListener
to remove Submit a bug or feature
For further API reference and developer documentation, see Java SE Documentation. That documentation contains more detailed, developer-targeted descriptions, with conceptual overviews, definitions of terms, workarounds, and working code examples.
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