Mark Phipps created NETBEANS-1979:
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Summary: Allow Modes to be created programmatically from XML
Key: NETBEANS-1979
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/NETBEANS-1979
Project: NetBeans
Issue Type: Improvement
Components: platform - Window System
Affects Versions: 10.0
Reporter: Mark Phipps
I work for Sucden Financial Limited and I run a team that develops a trading
system called STAR which has a Java Swing front end desktop application which
we have recently (it has taken a couple of years!) ported to the NetBeans
Platform, all with Maven.
A feature of the application is where the user is able to save the layouts of
windows and panels in different combinations and load them up as required. We
call this work-space management. The entire layout of all the windows and their
components is saved in one XML file. (Note this is NOT the same as the term
"work space" which I have seen is a deprecated mechanism inside the NetBeans
window system and I am not suggesting that should be resurrected.)
To enable that feature in the NetBeans Platform, I made some minor additions to
the openide.windows module and small changes/refactoring to the core.windows
module to be able to capture the XML representation of ModeConfig objects and
subsequently reproduce Modes by passing XML into
WindowManager/WindowManagerImpl.
As I have ported our application to the Platform and investigated the window
system api and internals, It seemed to me that the original intention of the
window system and TopComponent relationship makes the assumption that some kind
of file on disk would always be associated with a TopComponent, but that is
definitely not our use case. Furthermore, only saving the layout of Modes at
application shutdown, within a NetBeans userdir rooted location is also not
suitable.
With these modifications, an application can capture and reproduce the Modes
required for TopComponents to be docked into, which is essential for us and I
think would be a useful feature in the windows api for other developers to use.
I have pushed these changes on my fork at
[https://github.com/phipma/incubator-netbeans/commit/cc170aa195c1f843edb3badff83776c2f794440c]
I am new at this and I have only done the minimum required to satisfy our
needs, so apologies if anyone considers it amateurish!
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