Custom Border for Callout Popup

[Kim Topley]

Richard,

Your comment about SkinBase here reminds me of a question that I have been
meaning to ask for some time. Is it likely that the classes and methods
necessary to write CSS-aware and skinnable custom controls will be made
public any time soon (e.g. for JavaFX 3.0?). I have never yet worked on a
project of any size that did not require lots of custom AWT or Swing
controls. At the moment, if I wanted to do move such an application to
JavaFX, or to write a library of custom controls for JavaFX, I would need
to either use non-public APIs or swallow the expense of writing everything
myself. Either way, I would then have to rewrite everything later when the
real APIs are made available.  Given that the skinning and CSS APIs seem to
be quite stable now, and you already have many controls that are designed
around them, how much of a problem would it be to have a quick review and
make them all public?

Kim


On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Richard Bair <richard.bair at oracle.com>wrote:

> I think what I would have done would be to extend from PopupControl. Then
> write a new Skin for your Callout. The skin would add the path as one of
> its children, and whatever content is added to the content would then be
> added after the path. The path would have "managed" set to false. Then, in
> the layoutChildren() method of your Callout, you would reposition the path
> based on the current bounds and then call super.layoutChildren() which
> would position and layout the content.
>
> So something like:
>
> public class Callout extends PopupControl {
> ...
> }
>
> // Doh! SkinBase is a private class, but you can copy/paste it into your
> code if it is GPL+classpath..., otherwise just see what it does and write a
> fresh Skin that does the same
> public class CalloutSkin extends SkinBase<Callout> {
>    private Path path;
>    ...
> }
>
> Richard
>
>
>
> On May 7, 2012, at 12:32 PM, Werner Lehmann wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am creating a popup for a callout. The callout is basically a
> rectangle with a small arrow/tail on the top right corner and a single node
> for its content. That node may resize later and the callout has to adjust.
> http://i49.tinypic.com/21crux3.jpg
> >
> > First I tried to do this with -fx-shape and an svg path but without
> luck: could not make this work, never saw that shape. Unfortunately I also
> did not find any example... I suppose even an SVG path border would not
> resize automatically when the content changes - otherwise this would be
> exactly what I need ;-)
> >
> > Plan B is to use a Popup with a Path in the appropriate shape. This
> works but I am battling two things:
> >
> > 1. I have to know the popup content layout bounds before I can position
> the popup "right aligned". Currently solved by showing the popup offscreen
> (at -10000, 0) to get valid layoutBounds. Then I move it to the correct
> position. Is there a better way to get layoutBounds before showing a window?
> >
> > 2. When the content size changes, a similar problem arises: now I have
> to determine the new popup size, change the border Path to match the new
> size (PathElement binding might work here) and reposition the window. A
> resize animation would be nice, and some clipping will be needed also...
> >
> > This is when I got an idea: is it possible to create and use a custom
> border class? Looks as if I could extend
> com.sun.javafx.scene.layout.region.Border... In this way I would get
> content clipping and resizing (position of arrow/tail must be adjusted) for
> free.
> >
> > Any thoughts?
> >
> > Thanks.
> > Werner
> >
>
>