the parsing capability of Swing Designer

[chatbaby]

I am looking for the information which discuss about the parsing
capability of Swing Designer, here is what I found from the Web site,

Here are some examples of constructs that WindowBuilder Pro does not
yet handle:
-Re-use of GridBagConstraint objects across multiple widgets (we
support reusing the same variable but not the same objects)
-UI construction through the use of local parameterized helper methods
-Multiple aliases (fields or local variables) referring to the same component
-Multiple references to the same widget definition through multiple
invocations of the same helper method
-Dynamic GUI code based on runtime calculations

I am wondering if this is all the code which swing designer cannot
parse and render? Do you have a more detailed document to explain what
is the "Dynamic GUI code based on runtime calculations"? I know loop
and if-else would be considered as in this category, but I am
wondering if there are any other cases which also fall into this
dynamic GUI code category?

Thank you very much for your help and time.

Cheers
Lawrence

[Eric Clayberg]

"Dynamic code" would be anything that is not static in nature. Imagine a form that is constructed based on a series of database calls or some other external state. Any widgets defined within a loop or within an if statement would be good examples of this.

[chatbaby]

HI Eric,
Thank you very much for your reply. I am wondering if you have more detailed documents to explain the parser which is used by WindowBuilder? Or would you please simply explain the parsing mechanism which is used by WindowBuilder?

I am a PhD student and I am doing some of my research based on WindowBuilder. So I need to understand the parsing mechanism which has been used by WindowBuilder, but it is really difficult to find a complete documentation to explain how the GUI parser works.

Cheers
Lawrence

[Eric Clayberg]

I am not aware of any such documents.

As a PhD student, you know that nothing beats looking at the actual code. WindowBuilder is now an Eclipse open source project, so you can check out the WB source here...

http://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/tools/org.eclipse.windowbuilder

You should start by looking at the org.eclipse.wb.core.parseFactories extension point and its various implementors like org.eclipse.wb.internal.swing.parser.ParseFactory.

Take notes on what you find, write it up, and contribute it back to the project. We could always use more docs (especially on the internals).