Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog: March 2006 Archive

Posted by kirillcool on March 28, 2006 at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

The previous entry on LAF support for RTL components compared various core (Metal / Windows) and third-party look-and-feels for RTL-oriented menus. Due to a bug in core Swing classes, all LAFs suffered from accelerator alignment problem (has been since partially fixed in Looks). I have filed a bug (internal number 653437) on this issue on February 19th with the proposed fix, but five weeks later it hasn't even been acknowledged. Oh well :(

Now it's time for RTL combos. First, before people start pointing fingers to the specifications, here is a screenshot of RTL combo in IE7 on XP (it looks the same in Firefox):

Note that not only the drop button is on the left-hand side, but the popup itself is layed accordingly (scroll on left, everything aligned to the right). Having native acquaintance with RTL environment, i can most certainly confirm that this is how it should look like. Now, let's see Metal and Windows core Swing LAFs:

Here, we have three major problems that are propagated to almost all third-party LAFs as well:

The selected value is not right-aligned and is instead very close to the drop arrow button.
The scroll bar on popup is on the right side and not under the drop arrow button.
The popup values are not right-aligned

The overall impression is that of a complete disaster (and i'm not exaggerating).

What about third-party LAFs? JGoodies Looks was the clear winner in RTL menus, but this time Substance comes on top (after significant code fixes:). So, the first place is Substance:

The second place belongs to Synthetica (commercial), JGoodies Looks, Squareness and Pagosoft (with the nice touch of flipping the arrow orientation on popup activation). All of them inherit Swing problems with renderer alignment and scrollbar placement:

The third place goes to Liquid and Tiny with the additional problem of the location of drop arrow button:

The fourth place goes to Napkin with the additional problem of missing glyphs and no visual mark of currently selected (rollover) item:

The fifth place goes to Office (ClassCastException on NetBeans color selection combobox with custom cell renderer), Trendy (commercial, the same ClassCastException) and Metouia (NullPointerException).

In addition to this RTL problem in core Swing classes, i have also found two other problems:

Scroll buttons on wrapped tabbed pane are not shown at all (with the exact fix) got internal number 673417 on March 19.
System menu not correctly aligned got internal number 673418 on March 19.

Needless to say that both are yet to appear on bugparade. And if you're about to say "Contribute to Mustang, that's why we have the process" - sorry, don't have the time to invest in this.

Spicing up your JTabbedPane - part III

Posted by kirillcool on March 14, 2006 at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is the third part of the series that describes the additional capabilities that you can get on your tabbed panes once you start using the Substance look-and-feel. The first part described close buttons and animation on modified tabs, while the second part described vetoable close buttons and vertical tabs. This entry describes new features available in the next version of Substance (code-named Firenze, currently available in development status).

The first addition is single-click close of multiple tabs. This functionality borrows from both NetBeans (Alt+Click on close button closes all tabs but this, Shift+Click on close button closes all tabs) and Firefox (middle click closes tab). The logic that decides what tabs to close is written by the application and set on the corresponding tabbed pane. Substance tracks down mouse events on the relevant tabs, calls the application callback and closes the tabs specified by the application. Here is the example code to clarify this capability.

Application needs to implement the TabCloseCallback interface which contains the following four functions:


  public TabCloseKind onAreaClick(JTabbedPane tabbedPane, int tabIndex,

      MouseEvent mouseEvent);



  public TabCloseKind onCloseButtonClick(JTabbedPane tabbedPane,

      int tabIndex, MouseEvent mouseEvent);



  public String getAreaTooltip(JTabbedPane tabbedPane, int tabIndex);



  public String getCloseButtonTooltip(JTabbedPane tabbedPane, int tabIndex);

The first two functions are called when the user clicks on either the tab itself or on its close button (if specified). TabCloseKind is an enum with the following values:


  public enum TabCloseKind {

    NONE, THIS, ALL, ALL_BUT_THIS

  }

The last two functions are used to provide tooltips to instruct the user about the application-specific behaviour of single-click tab close. Sample implementation of this interface is:


    TabCloseCallback closeCallbackMain = new TabCloseCallback() {

      public TabCloseKind onAreaClick(JTabbedPane tabbedPane,

          int tabIndex, MouseEvent mouseEvent) {

        if (mouseEvent.getButton() != MouseEvent.BUTTON2)

          return TabCloseKind.NONE;

        if (mouseEvent.isShiftDown()) {

          return TabCloseKind.ALL;

        }

        return TabCloseKind.THIS;

      }



      public TabCloseKind onCloseButtonClick(JTabbedPane tabbedPane,

          int tabIndex, MouseEvent mouseEvent) {

        if (mouseEvent.isAltDown()) {

          return TabCloseKind.ALL_BUT_THIS;

        }

        if (mouseEvent.isShiftDown()) {

          return TabCloseKind.ALL;

        }

        return TabCloseKind.THIS;

      }



      public String getAreaTooltip(JTabbedPane tabbedPane, int tabIndex) {

        return null;

      }



      public String getCloseButtonTooltip(JTabbedPane tabbedPane,

          int tabIndex) {

        StringBuffer result = new StringBuffer();

        result.append("<html><body>");

        result.append("Mouse click closes <b>"

            + tabbedPane.getTitleAt(tabIndex) + "</b> tab");

        result

            .append("<br><b>Alt</b>-Mouse click closes all tabs but <b>"

                + tabbedPane.getTitleAt(tabIndex) + "</b> tab");

        result.append("<br><b>Shift</b>-Mouse click closes all tabs");

        result.append("</body></html>");

        return result.toString();

      }

    };

Here, simple click on close button closes the relevant tab, alt-click on close button close all tabs but the clicked one and shift-click on close button closes all tabs. In addition, we have the matching tooltip message when the mouse hovers over the close button:

Furthermore, middle click on the tab close that tab and shift-middle-click closes all tabs. The last line associates our tab-close callback with one of our tabbed panes. In order to match the multiple-tabs close, the option to veto the tab close has been augmented with VetoableMultipleTabCloseListener interface - see the test application for the sample usage.

The second major enhancement to the tabbed panes was requested by one of the users. This enhancement allows to specify custom alignment of tab texts on left and right placement. The default Swing behaviour is center-alignment, which can lead to unfriendly "fir-like" zigzags on tabs with varying text lengths:

In order to overcome this behaviour and allow applications to show left or right aligned texts, Substance provides the following enum:


  public enum TabTextAlignmentKind {

    DEFAULT, ALWAYS_LEFT, ALWAYS_RIGHT, FOLLOW_PLACEMENT, FOLLOW_ORIENTATION

  }

The values are:

DEFAULT - default alignment (centered).
ALWAYS_LEFT - text is always aligned to left.
ALWAYS_RIGHT - text is always aligned to right.
FOLLOW_PLACEMENT - on LEFT placement text is aligned to left, on RIGHT placement text is aligned to right.
FOLLOW_ORIENTATION - recommended alignment. For LTR orientation text is aligned to left, for RTL orientation text is aligned to right.

In order to set the text alignment, use client property SubstanceLookAndFeel.TABBED_PANE_TEXT_ALIGNMENT_KIND on either tabbed pane or globally on UIManager. Value should be an element of the above enum. Screenshots of DEFAULT, ALWAYS_LEFT and ALWAYS_RIGHT alignment:

Screenshot of FOLLOW_ORIENTATION in RTL-oriented application with RIGHT placement:

Stay tuned for the next part of this series - much more to come.

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