Dialogs in JavaFX

[Jeff Martin]

That is a great post. I think the big problem with dialogs in Swing was the permutations problem. There were four basic types of dialogs (Message, Confirm, Option, Input) with six different parameters (Title, Message, Icon, Content, MessageType, Options) - so JOptionPane ended up with a sea of static methods that were confusing to navigate.

I don't think you could go wrong with a simple DialogBox class like this (I love simple):

	// Constructor
	public DialogBox(String aTitle);

	// Options
	public String getTitle();
	public void setTitle(String aTitle);
	public String getMessage();
	public void setMessage(String aMessage);
	public MessageType getMessageType();
	public void setMessageType(MessageType aMessageType);
	public Node getContent();
	public void setContent(Node aNode);
	public Node getGraphic();
	public void setGraphic(Node aNode);
	public String[] getOptions();
	public void setOptions(String ... theOptions);

	// Convenience methods to set Message + MessageType
	public void setErrorMessage(String aMessage);
	public void setWarningMessage(String aMessage);
	public void setQuestionMessage(String aMessage);

	// Show methods
	public void showMessageDialog(T aComp);
	public boolean showConfirmDialog(T aComp);
	public int showOptionDialog(T aComp, String aDefault);
	public String showInputDialog(T aComp, String aDefault);

	// Programatic dismissal
	public void confirm();
	public void cancel();

Then most common invocations would look something like this:

	// Get user confirmation
	DialogBox dbox = new DialogBox("Sanity Check");
	dbox.setWarningMessage("Are you sure you want to do this? It could kill you.");
	if(!dbox.showConfirmationDialog(focusedNode)) return;

Using instance methods instead of static methods gives opportunity to subclass and override various methods. And notice the Content attribute - for the standard case when no Content is provided, it is built programmatically based on the parameters (essentially just the message and either an Option combo, an input textfield or nothing).

I've been using this in my JavaFX app for a while and it is working great and makes porting from Swing easy. I even built it on a convenient FormBuilder class that makes building a simple stack of form controls easy, and can also be used for advanced DialogBoxes.

Jeff Martin
214.513.1636


On Jun 20, 2014, at 7:05 AM, Stephen F Northover <steve.x.northover at oracle.com> wrote:

> Great post Jonathan.  The summary is that whatever direction we take, we'll have a plan for the future.  So if we run out of time and provide only a very scaled back API, we'll have prototyped how it can evolve to handle more complex cases.
> 
> Steve
> 
> On 2014-06-20, 12:37 AM, Jonathan Giles wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> Dialogs are something everyone wants, and also something most people seem to have an opinion on! JavaFX 8u40 will have dialogs, but what form they take (API-wise) is not yet defined. I've posted a relatively long discussion on this over at FX Experience [1] and your feedback is highly welcome. As I note in the blog post, the Jira issue for this feature is RT-12643. If you have any thoughts, please do post them there (rather than spam the many good people subscribed to openjfx-dev).
>> 
>> [1] http://fxexperience.com/2014/06/bringing-dialogs-to-javafx/
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>