TableView enhancements for JavaFX 2.2

[Tom Eugelink]

Wat would be interesting is to be able to indicate that a cell as an error, maybe by showing a red border. Or by some overlay.


On 2012-03-07 21:40, Jonathan Giles wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm in the very early stages of planning improvements to TableView for JavaFX 2.2, particularly centred around the following three Jira issues.
>
> http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-19450
> http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-14943
> http://javafx-jira.kenai.com/browse/RT-14909
>
> Basically, I am wanting to make it easier to style and customise TableView. The two main use cases are:
>
> 1) allowing for CSS styling to, for example, change the background colour of a given column. This requires that we provide an easy way to expose each column via CSS. As mentioned in RT-19450, the best approaches I can think of right now are to add two style classes per column: column-x (where x is the column index), and also a styleclass of the TableColumn.text property (although I'm not sure this second styleclass is really necessary or useful, as the id property can be used to achieve the same thing, and we don't overuse the styleclass list). To achieve this, I'd need to add more API to the TableColumn class for id/style/styleclass.
>
> 2) allowing for developers to customise the TableColumn header area, for example, to allow for people to put filter buttons in, hide the sort arrows, add a media player control, etc.
>
> The general approach I want to take is to have TableColumn copy (not extend from) a number of the Labeled APIs, as well as the id/style/styleclass properties. My justification for wanting to take this approach is to prevent TableColumn becoming a Control. A similar discussion will need to be had about Tab, which has much the same requirements. Perhaps there is a need for some kind of abstract interface / class that sits above Labeled, but I think this may be taking things too far (for possibly no perceivable gain, except perhaps ensuring API consistency). Another option is to have a 'label' property that people can interact with directly.
>
> With the addition of the Labeled API, I can then easily add listeners to maintain the relevant id/style/styleclass on each TableColumn skin, and add API to allow for customisation of the header area (refer to RT-14909 for a example of the API I have in mind).
>
> If you have any concerns, questions or feature requests related to this topic, please put them forward in this thread.
>
> Thanks,
> Jonathan
>