Sirius GUI Toolkit : Item Pane

The Item Pane, along with the View Pane, provide the main body of the Sirius GUI widget set. The Item Pane can be used in isolation, or wrapped together with a View Pane using the 'CombiPane' widget, which simply creates both components and adds additional event hooks between them, so that visually highlighting an entry in the View Pane will display that item in the Item Pane without triggering a complete change of view in all associated components.

The ItemPane can group methods and properties, as a more convenient way of displaying items with large numbers of properties. Grouping can be controlled internally, or via a grouping toolbar.

Properties

The ItemPane presents properties either as text or graphic labels, or as input fields, depending on whether they are flagged as read-only or not (this can be automatically determined when exposing javabean published properties). The following standard input-field Property widgets are available:

A text-field style which will bind correctly to any Object that offers a Constructor accepting a String argument that matches the output of its toString() method. Booleans can be mapped to checkboxes (see the third screenshot below).

A dialog-based Object editor is also available, that presents a dialog offering a search through the scrapbok filtering on items whose reference object matches the parameter base class or interface.

Custom property editor types can be set via a property sheet, mapped to specific classes, or to base classes and interfaces.

Methods

Methods are presented using a uniform method widget that consists of

• the method name and an input button
• a property editor widget for each parameter (if the method requires parameters). These are usually hiden initially when in the Item Pane, and will pop open when the input button is first clicked.
• a status bar for displaying simple results. Complex object results will be sent to the scrapbook.

Clicking the input button will have a different effect for parametered and non-parametered methods. Methods without parameters will be executed on first click. If the method has parameters, clicking the button will 'pop' the widget open, exposing these parameters. Clicking on the button once the widget is opened will execute the method.