Custom components

[javadude]

Hi I like the product very much and I'm considering to buy. However I want to be sure that I can drop my own components on to the designer.

For instance when I make a class with some widgets on it, I want to be able to use that class in the designer. The free desinger doesn't support that I believe.

[Eric Clayberg]

Hi I like the product very much and I'm considering to buy. However I want to be sure that I can drop my own components on to the designer. For instance when I make a class with some widgets on it, I want to be able to use that class in the designer. The free desinger doesn't support that I believe.

It might be helpful, if you provided an example of what you want to do. Do you want to use custom SWT widgets? The Designer does have some limited support for doing that now. If you use an instance of a custom SWT widget that inherets from one of the supported controls, the Designer will allow you to manipulate it in the same way as the supported control. For example, if you used a (hypothetical) MaskText widget in your design, the Designer would treat it as a Text widget and give you access to all of those properties and events. You would not have access to any special characteristics (like the mask character) through the editor, but you could add those setting via code. We do have some work underway right now that will make the support for custom widgets much better in the future. Ultimately, once the Sweet spec (e.g., beaninfo for SWT) stabilizes, we hope to support that as an alternative as well.

We also plan to support the creation of user-defined widgets by allowing custom org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Composite subclasses to be created in the Designer (just as you can create dialog and wizard subclasses) and then used within other layouts. This will allow you to build up domain-specific collections of custom widgets.

If, OTOH, you are referring to the ability to edit user-written GUI classes in arbitrary formats, the Designer does not handle that well in its current release (the Designer supports only its own code generation style). That will get much better in the near future as we are in the process of enhancing the Designer's parsing and code generation engine to support a much wider range of styles. In addition to the Designer's "block" code gen style, we will also support the more common "flat" style used in most of Eclipse. We will also be adding options to allow you to control, by default, where variables are defined and whether you want the generated code to be automatically formatted using your Eclipse code formatter settings.