I have the following requirement for a GUI, that the user will have a number of available actions to perform.
Currently, it is implemented a series of JButtons that the user presses.
But the actions are a lot, and in each version more "actions" would be possibly offered.
I am not sure how this is better presented/done in GUIs.
I have read that there are ways to form a gui describing relevant information in an xml file.
I am using Netbeans and swing. Is the xml a good idea, to describe the actions available and for example create the same number of buttons? If yes, how would I start on this?Additionally would a jtoobar be a good idea for the actions? I mean add as many buttons as needed in the Jtoolbar.
I guess this is a general question but I am not experienced in GUIs.
Any help would be appreciated!
Thank you.
There seems to be two separate issues involved:
How to describe and create a large number of actions?
How to represent a large number of actions in GUI?
#Tom's answer is for #1, and #Fabio's for #2.
You can use any textual format for #1, xml, csv, whatever you like. It's indeed a good idea to separate that from code. XML is great for hierarchical data, so it may be overkill if you just need a flat list:
<doc>
<action name="Action 1" id="ACT1" description="blah blah" icon="icon1.gif"/>
<action name="Action 2" id="ACT2" description="yada yada" icon="icon2.gif"/>
...
</doc>
But parsing such a simple XML is basically free, so you may as well just use it. You do not, however, need a full-featured XML GUI toolkit like SwiXML, unless you want to add many other GUI widgets with complex layout to your app.
Note the attributes I have in the above sample. id would map to a unique action command. You can display description and icon (I suppose you use icon already) any way you want. You could also have other properties like mnemonic, accelerator, etc., at which point using XML starts to pay off: you can add arbitrary attributes that you need.
One obvious omission in the XML is the actual actions themselves. I do not think you should put Java code in XML. It defeats the separation of concern. Instead you can define your action code in a generic way (e.g. extend AbstractAction) and map them with the action IDs. If you do use AbstractAction, you can trivially map your attributes to action property keys like Action.NAME, Action.LONG_DESCRIPTION, etc.
Now you have parsed the XML into a list of action objects, and here comes the second question: how do you display them?
JList (per #Fabio) is indeed the most efficient way. It's much more compact than a whole bunch of individual buttons, yet unlike JComboBox you can see many items at once, and you can easily add sort/search/filter.
But list is not very flexible. You could use a custom ListCellRenderer to display icon and tooltip (for description), but you'll start to stretch it when you want to group items.
I think the most flexible way would be a tree table, which allows you to have multi-level hierarchy. You can start with 2 columns, the first column showing action names hierarchically, the second column showing description.
You could put the table in a collapsible panel so that it can be hidden when user wants to focus on the results.
Now w.r.t. JToolBar, you're right that it's standard, however as Fabio's comment pointed out, it's bad usability when you have too many buttons on a toolbar (like M$ Word before ribbon).
What would be a great use of a toolbar, however, is to allow user to place actions of their choice onto the toolbar, like most popular desktop apps do. You could use a "Customize Toolbar" dialog, or simply let user drag-n-drop items from your list or table.
Unfortunately, many of the GUI constructs that I mentioned above are not available in JDK. You can find all of them (tree table, search/filter, collapsible panel, customizable toolbar, etc.) from the excellent commercial JIDE libraries (disclaimer: I don't work for them, though I sometimes wish I do), or you can find FOSS alternatives.
I don't know if i did understand your question well, but it seems to me that the JButton approach isn't the most efficient way to do such thing. Imagine that the number of actions starts to be really big, drawing too much buttons leads to an unintuitive and non-appealing interface. An alternative would be using a JComboBox or a JList, to list all the actions not requiring much space and having a single button "do!" to execute the action.
I hope it was useful ;)
Contrary to popular belief around a decade ago, XML is not usually a good idea. An appropriate language to express this "programming" in is Java.
Related
I'm using NetBeans 8 IDE to design a desktop application. How can I transit among different forms (e.g. login page and homepage)? Should I design multiple .java JForms or is it possible to completely delete previous components and bring new ones?
Is there something like hidden tabs that aren't shown to the user but really exist? I am looking for a high performance way to toggle forms.
Were you to have the form constructed programmatically - although this is a bit inefficient - you could use a switch statement in a loop with cases that contain the individual forms, and statements to clear the existing form components. There's also an easy JavaFX navigation solution using a larger-than-viewport area (containing each form in a horizontal series) wherein the forms get the viewport one-by-one, but it looks like you're using swing; sorry if it's of no help in this case.
I'm trying to write a program that has several navigation buttons, for example the classical "Back" and "Forward" buttons. I would need a way to let the user to navigate through the different pages (JPanels, to be true). How can I do that? Or better, how would a real programmer (I'm a beginner jet) do that? I'm using for the moment CardLayout and I thought to store the "path" that the user does and use previous() and next() methods that CardLayout provides. What about this solution? Is it a bit "dummy"? Does a kind of "navigation pattern" exist?
You may simply store created JPanels in a List or a Stack as long as they keep they internal states unchanged by any other JPanels. However this might be a little resources hungry, thats why its better to store just internal state of an object rather than whole object.
Take a look at Memento Pattern:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_pattern
I'm developing a new application where I'll have some windows opened at the same time.
I'm currently trying to design the GUI and I'm struggling with two choices:
I could use a side navigation panel and using the center of the page to display the content of each panel. These panels would be stored according flyweight pattern and I would just hide/show them when navigation buttons are clicked (in order to save the content as is was when hidden, for example a user registration form).
I could use a front page displaying the menu all over it and use popups/new windows to show the content. These could be closed/minimized etc).
My problem is: What if all the panels are stored in my flyweight pattern? will it have a huge performance hit or will it still run smoothly with like 15 JPanels stored? (of course those JPanels will have sometimes lots of content in it such as forms etc).
What do you think would be the best easy-to-use/performance choice ?
Thank you :)
JTable rendering already uses the flyweight pattern, so a one column table is ideal for selection. A custom renderer can display an arbitrary thumbnail representation, while a ListSelectionListener can display arbitrary detail in an adjacent container. In the TableModel, consider an LRU cache if the individual data records are consuming too much memory.
As always with performance questions, prototype and profile.
As long as you don't attempt to hold more data than fits the heap reasonably, performance will be a non-issue nowadays (unless you do something exceptionally bad you will not notice any performance difference from the user perspective).
That said, unless you have pressing reason to hold on to GUI's you currently don't need - just let them get GC'd and recreate them as needed. The create-throw-away after one use approach is more flexible when the application needs to be modified and bears less opportunities for memory leaks.
As for the GUI design aspect, many people absolutely hate popups. They can also interfere with focus management/keyboard usage. But it still depends on which kind of control flow you need. Side menu bar is fine for many purposes.
I'd like to point out that the side menu is just a fancy reinvention of Tabbed Pane (which is a standard component you wouldn't need to implement yourself). Also, if things need to be done in a specific order - a Wizard like approach can also be a good choice (one Window that changes contents with each step completed).
I have designed an html document editor and I wanted some help in resolving a design problem in it. The problem is as follows -
The document editor consists of a surface (JFrame) and a menu bar. Inside the surface I have three panels - a tool panel, text panel and status panel (which are all extensions of JPanel). The text panel has the customized text pane (extension of JTextPane). Now the problem is that - there are lots of scenarios where the menus and the widgets items on the tool panel need access to the underlying document model of the JTextPane. E.g. to implement list/paragraph dragging functionality, the ruler needs to know the position of the caret inside the document model, so that I can mark the paragraph whose left inset I need to increase.
The way I have organized my design right now is that - surface is a singleton, so to access the html document model inside the JTextPane you need to code your way through the following maze -
Give me surface -> go to text panel -> go to text pane -> go to document of the text pane
Another alternative to make the reference of the document inside the text pane static, so that it can be accessed directly.
TextPane.getTextDocument ()
Also the html document inside the Text Pane I am using is not customized right now. So I am just using the default HTMLDocument returned by the text pane. Though in future I may have to replace it with a more customized extension of HTMLDocument (e.g. to implement cusom tags)
I am somewhat of a design novice. Can some design guru throw some light/insight into this?
I think if you get 10 responses you'll get 11 answers. :-)
First, there is no need for a Singleton. In this scenario, it's just a way of cheating with a global variable. And what happens when you want to have two or three text documents open?
Do your menus have ready access to the tool panel? Since toolpanel is a sibling of the textpanel, and in a 1-1 relationship (I think?) it is somewhat "reasonable" for toolpanel to know about textdocument (have a link it) and a convenience method, getTextDocument(). And it seems reasonable for your widgets to know about their immediate parent, the tool panel.
That would be my way of approaching the problem - what links between objects "make sense". You want as little coupling as possible, but there are places where you do need coupling. Maybe I have misunderstood your problem, or maybe you think a lot differently than me, in which case you should do it another way. Also, you are making a best guess as to how your code might evolve in the future. Good luck with that! :-)
One big question for any solution - does the text document change? (e.g., is there a File->New menu or a File->Open menu?). If so, that needs to be considered. In my proposal, the JFrame, on a File->Open, would create the text document and then change the link to it in the ToolBar.
p.s. MVC purists - please add appropriate models and controllers! I just talked about the graphical components to keep things simpler...
p.p.s. Examples of "thinking ahead" for reasonable enhancements
Would this handle multiple JFrames open at once? Yes.
Would this handle a single JFrame, but with multiple documents (say, a tabbed interface for the text document)? Almost. The method has to be a little smarter to know which of the many documents is active, but you can easily imagine doing that.
How about when I need to hold a lot more info about the dicument, like the name (so Save gives a good default), last time saved, is it "dirty", is it HTML or XHTML or whatever... At this point, you'll probably want to add one more model layer. But you can sortof imagine, with one more layer of indirection (one more link) this being o.k. So it depends on how close you are to implementing #3 how you want to design.
I am creating a GUI program using MVC which should look like this..
alt text http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/6422/93381955.jpg
I have created a Window and Panel class. I am thinking of creating the Input and Display tabs in the Panel class and then creating two more classes, InputPanel and DisplayPanel. So the InputPanel will contain the stuff in this picture under the Input tab and same for the Display tab. Is there a better way to design this?
Also, since there are 3 sections in the Input tab (Name and sentence, crime, button), should I create 3 panels or just 1 panel containing all those?
Thanks
To answer your specific question about using three panels instead of 1, I would suggest two. There's rarely a need to create a panel just to create a single widget. So, one widget for the name and sentence, one for the crime.
As for the question about "is there a better way to design this"?... It sounds like you are learning, so I suggest you don't focus too much on the perfect way to do it. Stick with your original design then after the task is done ask yourself what worked* and what didn't. With that information you'll be able to decide for yourself whether what you did was the right design.
There usually isn't a "best" when designing GUI code -- there are many ways to solve the problem. What you've described sounds like a perfectly good way to attack the problem
(*) "worked" in this context means, was it easy to code? Did it allow you to achieve the layout you desired? Does it make the code maintainable over time if, for example, a requirement comes down to reorganize the GUI?.
Bryan gave good advices, I will just add that ergonomics isn't an exact science, although experience helps there.
Tabs are nice, eg. to separate settings, or group in a same panel (toolbox for example) different sets of tools (layers, colors, brushes...).
But they might not be adapted to all workflows. But we are lacking information about the role of the Display tab. Is it supposed to list all crimes in a table? Can't the table, if any, be below the controls?
As hinted by Bryan, it is better to design the GUI, then to test it, like would do a real user. Do you find the workflow easy to understand? (make somebody else to test it!) Does the usage feels natural? Is it fast to use?
Then you can adjust the design in light of these observations.
You were right to create InputPanel and DisplayPanel as seperate classes.
As for further splitting those panels? Yes you should further split them up, but not into separate classes. You should add jPanels inside of your InputPanel, and DisplayPanel, and group the controls within those internal jPanels.
Please let me know if you would like me to clarify what I mean.