Tim Boudreau's Blog

Egads! An actual Swing Tree-Table!

When I canvassed folks who had done Swing tree-tables on our mailing lists, most of them were based on that article, as ours was. What I heard back varied between groans of pain and mad rabid howls of pain. There are a few things in that original tree table design that just don't work - not reliably, anyway. Sending events to an offscreen component as if it were on-screen and expecting it to behave sanely is just a really bad idea that happens to work if the look and feel is a subclass of BasicLookAndFeel, and other look and feel implementations have been tormented into supporting this abuse by all the evil Tree-Table implementations in the wild. But the bottom line is, a look-and-feel author would have to be slightly insane to code their TreeUI to behave as if it were a live component when it has no parent and obviously is not one. In other words, the fact that the JTree-as-cell-renderer design works at all is just an accident of how BasicLookAndFeel's TreeUI implementation was designed, which other look and feels inherited. Never mind trying to use said JTree as a cell renderer in a table (I once made a 400% performance improvement in our tired, tortured, hacked-up TreeTable just by having it translate the graphics context instead of repositioning - and thus causing a re-layout) is seriously abusing the component. Now try convincing said offscreen JTree that it has keyboard focus in order to get it to paint appropriately in its role as a cell renderer for another component. On all look and feels. On all platforms. Everywhere.

You see what I mean.

After doing that canvassing back in '04, it was obvious that Swing needed a real tree-table component. So I started to write one (and the layout cache classes JTree uses were very, very helpful - thanks, Scott!).

I started on it, got the basics working, and then moved back to the U.S., changed jobs and ended up travelling the world full-time teaching other people to write NetBeans modules - but it didn't leave time to finish up the Tree Table work. Thankfully, my former office-mate, David Strupl, picked up where I left off when he left Sun to work on Nokia's NetBeans RCP app for managing cellular telephone networks.

The really, really great news is: This week, Standa Aubrecht - who took over a bunch of the stuff when I left full-time development of NetBeans in '04 and amazed me with how quickly he was able to get going in a complex codebase - committed it into the main line of NetBeans sources yesterday. So anybody who gets a dev build of NetBeans as of today has a perfectly working Swing Tree Table component they can use (the class name is Outline - I borrowed the name from Apple's Cocoa library - it's a little less clunky than "tree table" but gets the point across). The JAR file is org.netbeans.swing.outline.jar. Usage is incredibly easy - you just provide a standard Swing TreeModel of whatever sort you like, and an additional RowModel that can be queried for the other columns contents, editability and so forth. And you never have to worry about cells painted half one color and half another because the tree-cell part got repainted after focus went to a popup menu. It actually works!

The real credit here goes to David and Standa for getting this thing production-worthy - I just was pissed-off enough at having a gargantuan list of unfixable bugs (well, fix it on one platform, break it on another, or leave it unfixed everywhere, or semi-fixed some places - pure evil if you hold the illusion that what we do is computer science) four years ago to get the ball rolling. They're the guys who delivered it.

I'm incredibly happy to see this finally be real and available not just to people writing NetBeans modules, but anybody doing GUI apps in Java. There has been a need for a real, reliable tree table component for Swing programmers for a long, long, long time. All hail David and Standa!

Comments

• Wow-
  "the fact that the JTree-as-cell-renderer design works at all is just an accident of how BasicLookAndFeel's TreeUI implementation was designed"

  I wonder how many more such "accidents" are waiting to happen?

  -JohnR
  

  Posted by: johnreynolds on June 03, 2008 at 04:59 AM

• actually, it's 'all hail tim and david!'
  i just moved the source code from one repository to another...

  standa

  Posted by: saubrecht on June 03, 2008 at 05:11 AM

• Hi Tim,
  This sounds great. Is there a precompilled jar I could download or should I build form the source?

  Posted by: aberrant on June 03, 2008 at 09:47 AM

• aberrant:

  Downloading the sources would be best so you could debug into the code if needed, but you could also grab the precompiled binary JAR from NetBeans' Hudson build server.

  Posted by: tomwheeler on June 03, 2008 at 10:01 AM

• Aberrant: Today's daily NetBeans build should contain the relevant JAR file - easy to isolate and use and no dependencies on other NetBeans code.

  JohnR, wondering how many similar accidents are waiting to happen: Way too many. It's really easy to think you're depending on an API when actually you're depending on a detail of how that API was implemented. This is the stuff that makes careers for me and Jarda Tulach, teaching API design. I'm glad we're feeding our families, but it's a bit pathetic that the fairly simple degree of analysis needed to figure out if you're creating a big honking hole isn't a basic part of everyone's design process - I guess it's because most of the world hasn't figured out that they're designing APIs whether they like it or not...

  Posted by: timboudreau on June 03, 2008 at 10:49 AM

• Is there an easy way to use this with nodes and an ExplorerManager, or is org.openide.explorer.view.TreeTableView still the way to go?

  Posted by: tomwheeler on June 03, 2008 at 12:15 PM

• Hi Tim,
  - great news
  - the link to the prcompiled jar doesn't work
  - any chance of this component being given to the comunity for integration with a next java-release?

  Posted by: f_beullens on June 04, 2008 at 05:40 AM

• Your screenshot leaves a lot to be desired. You should update the article with a clean, large screenshot of what this new component looks like.

  Posted by: cowwoc on June 04, 2008 at 06:16 AM

• How does it compare to SwingLabs JXTreeTable - and for that matter why not use JXTreeTable?

  Posted by: luano on June 04, 2008 at 07:55 AM

• Have been using JXTreeTable for years which also revolves around javax.swing.TreeModel and what one must assume, very similar UI delegates etc. to this org.netbeans.swing.Outline (not a very intuitive name) component.

  Is anyone aware of the differences between Swinglabs JXTreeTable control and this Outline one? To a naïve consumer this seems to be somewhat duplicated effort, considering they are both sponsored by Sun.

  Posted by: mrmorris on June 04, 2008 at 10:40 AM

• mrmorris, luano

  I think they both are very similar in one aspect: Both will never make it into the standard Java release - where such a widget would belong.

  In the extremely unlikely event that standard Java will get a tree widget expect it to be a completely different, third design.

  Posted by: ewin on June 04, 2008 at 10:56 AM

• The reason is JXTreeTable is (or was at the time) based on the same fatally flawed design as the one Outline was written to replace. Using it would have simply been replacing one unfixable set of bugs with a new set we'd never be able to fix except by begging the maintainers of that to slap as many band-aids on their version as our old one had.

  Posted by: timboudreau on June 04, 2008 at 11:04 AM

• Wow, this is really great new, Tim. This has been a HUGE problem for me for years also.

  Any thoughts of contributing this to SwingX or distributing the Outline jar file separately? It would be nice to have it in a more obvious/easier-to-get-to place than installing Netbeans and ripping a jar out. I guess you could also start a separate project as was done with your Wizard framework, but it really would be nice to have all this stuff in SwingX.

  Posted by: reden on June 04, 2008 at 11:14 AM

• how about an article on how to use it?

  Posted by: dog on June 04, 2008 at 12:34 PM

• >>how about an article on how to use it?

  see

  http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/entry/swing_outline_component

  Posted by: jancarel on June 05, 2008 at 03:39 AM

• tomwheeler wrote: Downloading the sources would be best so you could debug into the code if needed

  Is there any easy way to report (minor) bugs I have found?
  

  Posted by: bitguru on June 09, 2008 at 10:55 AM

• I guess I should clarify my previous comment. It's not that I want to report a bug in the "this doesn't work" sense, but minor code issues.
  For example, in this bit from Outline.java

  TableModel mdl = getModel();
  if (mdl instanceof OutlineModel) {
  return (OutlineModel) getModel();

  probably

  return (OutlineModel) mdl;

  was intended.

  Posted by: bitguru on June 09, 2008 at 11:08 AM

• There is a discussion on SwingX projetct about this component. See details in here.

  Regards.

  Posted by: hmichel on June 16, 2008 at 07:37 AM

• Hey! I was at the Netbeans Deep Dive Session at Manila and I saw you demonstrate the iReport Plugin on Netbeans. I have tried it and successfully made reports. My question is, how do I tell a jButton on my project to display the report once it is pressed? I know that I have to put some codes at the Event handler of the jButton but I don't know what to code. I saw a screencast on how it is done, but it didn't show what code I needed to write to be able to make a database connection. Sorry, Java is new for me and I am really relying on the IDE to get things done. The demo that I saw of you making it was fast and looks easy enough. Kindly help please...

  Thanks!

  Posted by: benhur99ph on June 30, 2008 at 11:19 PM

• 
  Hmm .. all references removed? Afraid of the competition ... ? Grinning, of course. A preview into a new SwingX JXTreeTable - inspired by this good break-through - is discussed over at the SwingLabs forum. Feedback highly welcome!

  http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=43641&tstart=0

  
  Jeanette

  
  

  Posted by: kleopatra on July 09, 2008 at 06:25 AM

• References removed? Don't know what you mean.

  I'm thrilled that some of this work is migrating into the SwingX tree table, where there is some hope that it will find its way one day into Swing itself!

  -Tim

  Posted by: timboudreau on July 10, 2008 at 12:07 PM

• 
  The fact I was referring to, is that all hyperlinks in all comments had been removed (probably due to the repeated spamming in one of them). This included the link under "SwingX" in hmichel's comment.

  Cheers
  Jeanette

  Posted by: kleopatra on July 11, 2008 at 12:08 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.