Lesson 10 : Compound Dockables

This is the 10th part of the VLDocking Framework for Java Swing applications.

This lesson covers the Compound Dockables, which give a means to create nested hierarchy of dockables.

Note : this lesson will be enhanced in the coming days...

Overview

Compound dockable containers is a feature available since VLDocking 2.1.

This feature adds support for nested containers, for example a Tabbed container in which would be nested splitted dockables.


Compound Dockables (inside a tabbed dockable container)

How does it work ?

VLDocking now contains a specialized Dockable, called CompoundDockable.

Unlike Dockable which is an interface, CompondDockable is a class, and it comes with an associated Component : the CompoundDockingPanel. There shouldn't be any need to subclass CompoundDockable.

You interact with CompoundDockable through its DockKey, which gives you a means to name it, to give it an icon and a tooltip (as that what's DockKeys are meant to be...).

Nesting dockables is performed with the new DockingDesktop method addDockable(CompoundDockable base, Dockable dockable) which can be used to start nesting, and then standard split() or createTab() methods can be used to alter the layout of the nested components.

Example : creating a tab containing two dockable (horizontal split)

DockingDesktop desk = ...
Dockable tab1 = ...;
Dockable tab2 = ...;
CompoundDockable compound = new CompoundDockable(new DockKey("Nested"));
Dockable nested1 = ...;
Dockable nested2 = ...;
desk.addDockable(tab1);
desk.createTab(tab1, tab2, 1);
desk.createTab(tab1, compound, 2); // compound is added as a tab
desk.addDockable(compound, nested1); // now we insert nested1
desk.split(nested1, nested2, DockingConstants.SPLIT_RIGHT); // and we split it

Of course, another way of dealing with nested dockable is to use the Workspace Manager Application and load directly your layout from a workspace XML stream.