TabFolder / TabItem Code Organsiation

[Mark Rowe]

I am trying to port a legacy application from Qt to Java. This is my first time with Java so please bear with me. I have also tried googling with every combination of words I can think of without success.

In the application the user selects a "work page" from a list (on the left of the screen) in a similar fashion to selecting a file in the Package Explorer in Eclipse. At startup only a "Welcome" type page is shown.

As each page is "opened" from the page list a new tab (TabItem) opens showing that page in the main part of the screen (again like Eclipse). The pages are quite different however, some containing text, some a few controls, some with tables others with further TabFolders in them.

I would like to:

Construct each "page" design using WindowBuilder

Have each page in a separate file (class)

Separate the code for the page business logic from the code for the UI

Add / delete / switch to the pages to the TabFolder at run time.

Any hints and tips on how to do this would be great.

Mark

[Michael Dunn]

TabFolder / TabItem - are these part of SWT?

If so, there's not a lot of SWT traffic here and many SWT questions remain unanswered.
Don't know the best place for SWT.

If it's Swing, it sounds like a JTabbedPane, and your 'component' questions would have simple answers.

[Mark Rowe]

Michael, thank you for taking the time to respond to my post and I am sorry I have been slow to reply.

Yes, these controls are part of SWT and are provided byorg.eclipse.swt.widgets.TabFolder and org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TabItem respectively.

TabFolder is basically a container for TabItems, which in turn can contain any number of other layouts and controls.

I haven't looked at Swing much, but from what I have just read it seems a similar concept except in Swing you add JComponents to the JTabbedPane whereas in SWT you add TabItems to the TabFolder.

I am interested in how you can solve this in Swing because it might be possible to use a similar method in SWT.

The approaches I have considered (but not tested) so far are:

Creating the tab page as a Dialog (or maybe Shell or Composite), adding layouts components etc. then adding it to the TabFolder by casting the Dialog to a TabItem (this is how Qt works)

Creating a Dialog (or Shell or Composite), adding a TabFolder and TabItem and then somehow referencing that TabItem in the main code

Out of interest, why isn't their much SWT traffic on this list?

Mark

[Michael Dunn]

A JTabbedPane sounds a lot like your TabFolder.
it looks like MS's Excel (tabs are at top), but each tab is (generally) a JPanel 'page',
with each 'page' containing one or more components.

here's a link to the 'How to use TabbedPanes' tutorial
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/components/tabbedpane.html
there are a number of demo programs there that you can run and see its functionality.

> Out of interest, why isn't their much SWT traffic on this list?

it seems none of the regular readers/helpers/contributors here uses SWT.
Possibly because it's tied in with Eclipse (I think) - I don't use Eclipse, and
that might be the same for the other regulars.

[Mark Rowe]

Thanks for the explanations!