I am currently working on a set of custom controls for a product of the company I'm working in. For this, I am extending a lot of Swing controls and also overriding a lot of paint methods.
In order to maintain a consistent color scheme, I receive the colors for my paint, setBackground etc. methods using UIManager.getColor.
This was perfectly fine until we noticed that the Nimbus LookAndFeel, which is shipped with current JRE versions, uses totally different color keys, thus many things looks totally out of place.
For instance, while all other stock LookAndFeels (Metal, Windows Classic, Windows, CDE/Motif, GTK) have defined the key "text" as a bright background for texts and "textText" as the corresponding foreground color, "text" in Nimbus is actually a black foreground color, and a standard text background color does not seem to exist.
"TextField.background" would work, but that, for instance, doesn't exist for the Windows LookAndFeels.
I suppose you get the problem by now. I don't want to have to maintain a set of color keys for each LAF, who knows what LAFs will be added in the future and which my company may decide to use.
A simple solution would be getting rid of Nimbus, of course, but understandably my boss doesn't like this idea at all, besides Nimbus is part of the JRE these days and should be supported.
So I wonder whether there is any standardized way to get LAF-dependent colors like, say, "text background / foreground", "selected text bg/ fg", etc.?
I'm not sure that there is a "standardized" way of getting these values.
As you noticed, Nimbus uses its own names for colors. Specifically, the properties textForeground and textBackground.
This oddness is likely because Nimbus uses a small selection of basic colors (listed as Primary in the chart), which have Secondary colors calculated from them, which in turn are used as the basis for all the remaining colors.
Yea, as #josefx implied, unfortunately this isn't how the UIs work. They're not a pool of generic portable properties, rather they're a set of actual components and specific implementations for each of those components. It's not really an extensible system that's friendly to custom components.
The level of abstraction IS the component, not something finer grained. If you try to ask for a ComponentUI for a component that the L&F does not know about, you're out of luck. And the ComponentUI is little more than a wrapper for a paint method, so it's not obligated to expose any meta data at all.
Simply put, you're stuck basically doing the JTextField (or some other appropriate component) "color scrape" technique that josefx suggests, or adding specific support in your code to handle the eccentricities of the property names of the L&F's that you wish to support well.
Another suggestion is to "pre-empt" the L&F change, and subclass the L&Fs you wish to support to make your components more of a first class citizen within those L&Fs. When the L&F changes to a L&F that you support, silently switch out their class name with your subclasses class name, and then implement ComponentUIs for your custom components, and extend the parent LookAndFeel.createUI method so that it "knows" about your new components.
None of these are pretty, but the Swing component system isn't designed to be extensible at run time to handle custom components. The entire component suite is done all at once when the L&F is created.
There is no way around it - you have to create your own abstraction layer for color names (and possibly other property names).
Basically you have stock LookAndFeels (Metal, Windows Classic, Windows, CDE/Motif, GTK) that use their own color names and Nimbus that uses different names.
Create a class e.g. LafProperties so that for each property/color you have method (e.g. "getTextColor"). This class returns properties for classic Laf styles. Then extend this class for Nimbus, and change only methods that differ in Nimbus.
If stock Lafs and Nimbus have most of the properties differently named, than use you might use an interface and two implementing classes.
Not a nice way but it should work for the basics:
Create a JTextField
call getForeground,getBackground,getSelectionColor to get the laf dependent values
Update:
The ComponentUI class and its subclasses which are the base classes for all look and feels only provide a method to initialise the laf dependent default values, they provide no direct way to access these values.
The java.awt.SystemColor class provides variables for a lot of the common attributes.
For text foreground/background use the member fields text/textText; for selected text, use textHighlight/textHighlightText.
Few things ppop into my mind reading your question, which is a tad spiced with underbelly frustration if I have sensed well:
dependancy on JRE standards/support versus independancy/freedom solutions
standards & conformity versus creativity & customisation
And thus ultimately:
practical approach of your boss versus programmers far future insights
Related
Both the Book of Vaadin and the Vaadin training course recommend using acom.vaadin.ui.CustomComponent to contain a Layout.
I can understand this in pure theory, to encapsulate the contents without needlessly exposing a specific layout such as GridLayout or HorizontalLayout. Encapsulating has benefits of:
Encouraging de-coupling between classes
Makes it easier to change the layout without having to change the declarations in the outer class.
But in terms of practicality, I assume the rendering of a CustomComponent means extra HTML/CSS layout instructions such as perhaps an another div. The last thing Vaadin rendering needs is yet another layering of HTML structure.
I wonder if this might be old folklore. Perhaps using the visual composing tool in Eclipse accepts only CustomComponent objects rather than Layout objects? (Just a wild guess, I have no knowledge)
➤ Alternatively, why not just declare in the outer class a reference variable of type com.vaadin.ui.Layout to get the same encapsulation?
➤ Am I exaggerating the impact of adding a CustomComponent to Vaadin rendering?
➤ Is there some other benefit of CustomComponent which I’ve failed to perceive?
You can compose the content of a CustomComponent with the Visual Designer. This saves a lot of time in the development process
The main advantage of the CustomLayout is, that you can place your components inside HTML code which you otherwise can't generate via vaadin means.
If this adds more div/html as with native Layouts depends on the specific case.
We ususally use it only when a clean Vaadin only solution would introduce more components/div's or is not possible to implement.
The second idea is the separation of layout and logic, which can be implemented partially with this Layout. You just specify which components you have and then a UI designer (in theorie) could make your HTML code, with the correct blocks where your components will be placed.
In real life I do not find this a real advantage, since the whole CSS, sizing etc. is anyway done with vaadin.
I want to change tabs location from left to center. How can I do this? I think I must change Look&Feel, but I don't know how.
From this:
To this:
As you already pointed out, you have to use an LookAndFeel which supports this design (centered Tab-Button).
When your selected LaF does not support this, you have to write your own TabbedPaneUI.
(But this may not be very easy.)
If you do not want to create your own TabbedPaneUI, you have to look for an existing custom TabbedPaneUI or TabbedPane-Component, which support this kind of layout.
You can take a look at this article, to get started:
http://www.javaworld.com/article/2072927/swing-gui-programmingloseandmaxtabbedpane--an-enha/swing-gui-programming/closeandmaxtabbedpane--an-enhanced-jtabbedpane.html
The placement of tabs is determined by the JTabbedPane UI delegate, typically based on BasicTabbedPaneUI. Not every Look & Feel implementation supports centered tabs, so there's no property that will work by default across platforms.
As a concrete example, com.apple.laf.AquaLookAndFeel supports centered tabs, as shown below. The class com.apple.laf.AquaTabbedPaneUI, which implements the effect, is shown here.
Because the implementation is non-trivial, a better choice is to support the user's Look & Feel choice using Preferences. A suitable Look & Feel selection control is shown here and here.
The source for the example above is seen here.
Some of the names are clear, like background, foreground, focus etc. But some are just confusing, like light, hightlight, shadow, darkshardow etc. I noticed that these are consistently used in swing UI, so I infer these are part of java's jargon. Does any body know if there is a document out there that explains these names ?
RadioButton.background
RadioButton.darkShadow
RadioButton.disabledText
RadioButton.focus
RadioButton.foreground
RadioButton.highlight
RadioButton.light
RadioButton.select
RadioButton.shadow
These are UIResource elements related to JRadionButton. Each Look & Feel provides different radio button appearance, and may set different defaults for these elements. It is also to up to L&F implementation to use these keys or not.
For example, here is a method from javax.swing.plaf.basic.BasicBorders that uses RadioButton.light and RadioButton.highlight:
public static Border getRadioButtonBorder() {
UIDefaults table = UIManager.getLookAndFeelDefaults();
Border radioButtonBorder = new BorderUIResource.CompoundBorderUIResource(
new BasicBorders.RadioButtonBorder(
table.getColor("RadioButton.shadow"),
table.getColor("RadioButton.darkShadow"),
table.getColor("RadioButton.light"),
table.getColor("RadioButton.highlight")),
new MarginBorder());
return radioButtonBorder;
}
However, it is may not be used by concrete L&F implementations.
PS:
UIManager Defaults by #camickr can be handy to visualize different keys.
I'm trying to change the text color of the Substance Look and Feel (in fact I'm using the SubstanceGraphiteGlassLookAndFeel .
I don't know how to do that...
Ultimately you have to mess with the color schemes.
Since you are using the Graphite Glass skin, messing with the color schemes is considerably easier since they values are not set in Java code. If you copy he file /org/pushingpixels/substance/api/skin/graphite.colorschemes into your classpath, you can go into the various scheme definitions and change the colorForeground entries to be whatever you want. Possibly black (#FFFFFF) or the various greys (#cccccc, #999999, #666666, #333333). But since they are hex colors you can do whatever you want.
change all Keys in UIManager by killing all things that to create this great theme
change value for all Keys in UIManager for all JComponents or concrete JComponent
change value for all value in Highlighter(s) for all JComponents or concrete JComponent
I'm not sure if this theme to use or not the Trident too, have to check on former Kirill's forum
or simpler to change for concrete JComponents instance, have to repeated for all JComponents
disclaimer
never to change Colors or Fonts for Custom Look and Feels, have to check if is or isn't there direct way implemented by author of L&F, never to tried that for all JComponents and this theme isn't my favorite, then point second is safer by eliminate side effect implemented in Custom L&F, but in this case you probably to loose implemented Highlighter(s)
Is it possible to set different L&F to specific component (in my case JTable) than is already used? If so, how to do it?
Edit: I wrote this piece of code according to this tutorial. Why is this code not working? No fails or exceptions, but JTable is still the same.
NimbusLookAndFeel nb = new NimbusLookAndFeel();
jTable1.putClientProperty("Windows.Overrides",nb.getDefaults());
jTable1.putClientProperty("Windows.Overrides.InheritDefaults",false);
You can refer the below URL for all UI default values for nimbus look and feel
http://jasperpotts.com/blogfiles/nimbusdefaults/nimbus.html
Go to Table section and use all the those Table component specific UI default values in your application. That should do the trick for you.
If you would like to apply the Nimbus L&F to a button, then you simply need to figure out which class that is responsible for rendering Nimbus buttons. The process is just the same as if you want to apply your very own custom L&F, where you set your own UI class on the button.
One trick you could do is create a dummy application that uses the Nimbus look and feel, create a JTable, and do something like
System.out.println (myTable.getUI ().getClass ().getName ());
At that point you will know which UI object is used to render the JTable when using the Nimbus LAF. You can use this class name when calling setUI (TableUI) on your JTable:
myTable.setUI (new ui_manager_class_name ());
As others have said, this is hardly something we recommend though. LAF's are usually meant to be used as a whole package rather than a mix of 2-3 LAF's. Your other way out could be to use the MultiLookAndFeel, but I have never used it, so I'm not sure it does fulfill your needs. You should read the associated tutorial if you want to use it correctly.