[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: TableCursors, TableViewers and multi-lin

[Tom Schindl <tom.schindl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

John,

I'm sorry that I have to disappoint you but I currently don't support 
multi-selection. There's a feature request [1] for this but I didn't had 
time in 3.4 to work on it (it's currently on my 3.5 TODO-List and if you 
want to push this forward I'm happy to work with you on this feature).

Until then you need to solve this your own but believe me it's hard to 
get it right :-(

The reason the selection you see is still valid is that we only erase 
the selection color using ownerdraw the underlying widget still reports 
the correct selection although I also want to provide a specialized 
StructuredSelection in future reporting the selected cells [2,3].

Tom

[1] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=206692
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=198260
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=151377

John Buslawski schrieb:
> We have an Eclipse application that displays model objects and their 
> properties in multiple tables. Because there are a quite a few 
> properties for some model objects we display the most accessed 
> properties directly in the table and use a properties view to display 
> the complete list of properties for the model object. We enable 
> multi-select so that someone can select a range of model objects (rows) 
> in the table, go to the properties view and edit a property and have the 
> value propagate to all of the selected model objects. We also use custom 
> cell editors for just about every property so it would be quite a bit of 
> change to create these editors inside a listener as suggested in some of 
> the JFace TableCursor snippets.
>
> Some of our users have asked for the ability to navigate the table with 
> the arrow keys like they do an Excel spreadsheet. We have looked through 
> some of the newsgroups and JFace snippets and have added the following 
> lines from Snippet036FocusBorderCellHighlighter into our existing code:
>
> TableViewerFocusCellManager focusCellManager = new 
> TableViewerFocusCellManager(v,new FocusBorderCellHighlighter(v));
> ColumnViewerEditorActivationStrategy actSupport = new 
> ColumnViewerEditorActivationStrategy(v) {
>    protected boolean 
> isEditorActivationEvent(ColumnViewerEditorActivationEvent event) {
>        return event.eventType == 
> ColumnViewerEditorActivationEvent.TRAVERSAL
>            || event.eventType == 
> ColumnViewerEditorActivationEvent.MOUSE_DOUBLE_CLICK_SELECTION
>            || (event.eventType == 
> ColumnViewerEditorActivationEvent.KEY_PRESSED && event.keyCode == ' ')
>            || event.eventType == 
> ColumnViewerEditorActivationEvent.PROGRAMMATIC;
>    }
> };
>        
> TableViewerEditor.create(v, focusCellManager, actSupport, 
> ColumnViewerEditor.TABBING_HORIZONTAL
>    | ColumnViewerEditor.TABBING_MOVE_TO_ROW_NEIGHBOR
>    | ColumnViewerEditor.TABBING_VERTICAL | 
> ColumnViewerEditor.KEYBOARD_ACTIVATION);
>
>
> The code performs as advertised. The table navigation works fine and the 
> cell editors get activated correctly. However, there is what appears to 
> be a bug with multi-line selections. When you make the last mouse 
> selection for a range of rows while holding down the shift key, only 
> that last selected cell is highlighted, not the full range of rows as 
> you would expect in a multi-select. However, if you were to go to the 
> properties view and modify a property, the new value  would be 
> propagated to all of the correct cells in the multi-select, not just the 
> highlighted cell. It appears as though the multi-select is still 
> functional but the hightlighting in the table is not correct. The range 
> of selected rows should be highlighted, not just the last selected cell.
> First, is this a known bug or working as designed? We have looked 
> through the SWT bugs and there really isn't anything that describes this 
> problem accurately.
> We are familiar with the TableCursor snippet where listeners are used to 
> recognize the shift and control keys and disable/enable the TableCursor 
> as appropriate. Is this snippet better suited for the capability we want 
> (arrow key navigation but be able to multi-select and highlight 
> correctly). It eliminates the FocusCellManager and from tracing through 
> the code it appears as though the SWTFocusCellManager is involved in 
> limiting the selection to the last cell chosen.
>
> Our application is currently based on Eclipse 3.3. We can easily move to 
> Eclipse 3.4 if necessary.


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Tom Schindl                                          JFace-Committer
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