[news.eclipse.platform] Re: using a hyperlink with a Table/TableViewer/T

[Francis Upton <francisu@xxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Tom, I was thinking along the lines you suggested.  I will make a 
link by changing the color and drawing a line using owner draw.

I decided to handle the clicking by just responding to the selection 
event on the TableViewer (thus allowing keyboard selection).

It would be nice if there was a simpler way to include links using the 
Viewers, since the TableEditor solution is so impractical.

Thanks again for your help!

Francis

Tom Schindl wrote:
> Francis Upton schrieb:
> > I'm writing a search facility for my product.  When searching, it's
> > possible for hundreds of results to be returned.  Each result is shown
> > as a table row with up to 3 links in it (to various levels of the
> > hierarchy representing the result).  The table is shown through a dialog
> > of a few rows.
> >
> > Previously this all worked fine (except without the hyperlinks) by
> > having a TableViewer.  The scrolling and resizing was fast, even if
> > there were thousands of results.
> >
> > Now I'm trying to add the links.  I see the following options:
> >
> > 1) Using a plain Table with a TableEditor (which refers to a Link
> > control).  This worked reasonably well, except for performance.  It's
> > unusable with more than a small number of rows.  There is also this bug:
> >
> > https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=166720
> >
> > So this option won't work (unless I'm doing it wrong or there is another
> > way to do it).
>
> Well if you really have so many results that's a problem because your
> Table has to handle very many Widgets whereas is in TableViewer there
> aren't hardly any!
>
> > 2) TableViewer - I don't think it's possible to have an arbitrary
> > control for rendering a table cell in use with a TableViewer unless I
> > subclass it.  Creating a CellEditor does no good, as this replaces the
> > control only when the cell is edited.
> >
> > My next step is to consider subclassing TableViewer and having it use a
> > TableEditor referring to a Link, however, I'm concerned I will run into
> > the same issues I have with option 1.
>
> Why does it have to be a TableEditor. You could make the String look
> like a link (underlining maybe is a problem but you can resolve it using
> custom drawing).
>
> To change the foreground color ITableColorProvider and to underline an
> item you can look at the owner draw support:
>
> Owner Draw is shown in:
> - http://www.eclipse.org/swt/snippets/
> -
> http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-CustomDrawingTableAndTreeItems/customDraw.htm
>
> If you want to open a link when the user clicks one of the emulated
> links you only need to track mouse clicks on your like shown in this
> snippet.
>
> http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/org.eclipse.swt.snippets/src/org/eclipse/swt/snippets/Snippet110.java
>
> If you are using 3.3 for development and there is/will be a bunch of new
> API which make all the above fairly easy.
>
> OwnerDraw:
> http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.jface.snippets/Eclipse%20JFace%20Snippets/org/eclipse/jface/snippets/viewers/Snippet010OwnerDraw.java?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
> (broken if you run it against current CVS)
> CellSelection:
> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=151377
>
> > 3) Use a TreeViewer.  The search results can be represented as a tree,
> > where each node then has only one link in it.  I have not looked into
> > this, but I would assume I will have to subclass TreeViewer as in option
> > 2 to have it render a Link.
> >
> > Are there other options?  Am I missing something obvious?
>
> The same as for TableViewer.
>
> > TIA,
> >
> > Francis