Basis of a text components look-and-feel. This provides the
basic editor view and controller services that may be useful
when creating a look-and-feel for an extension of
JTextComponent
.
Most state is held in the associated JTextComponent
as bound properties, and the UI installs default values for the
various properties. This default will install something for
all of the properties. Typically, a LAF implementation will
do more however. At a minimum, a LAF would generally install
key bindings.
This class also provides some concurrency support if the
Document
associated with the JTextComponent is a subclass of
AbstractDocument
. Access to the View (or View hierarchy) is
serialized between any thread mutating the model and the Swing
event thread (which is expected to render, do model/view coordinate
translation, etc). Any access to the root view should first
acquire a read-lock on the AbstractDocument and release that lock
in a finally block.
An important method to define is the BasicTextUI.getPropertyPrefix()
method
which is used as the basis of the keys used to fetch defaults
from the UIManager. The string should reflect the type of
TextUI (eg. TextField, TextArea, etc) without the particular
LAF part of the name (eg Metal, Motif, etc).
To build a view of the model, one of the following strategies
can be employed.
-
One strategy is to simply redefine the
ViewFactory interface in the UI. By default, this UI itself acts
as the factory for View implementations. This is useful
for simple factories. To do this reimplement the
BasicTextUI.create(javax.swing.text.Element)
method.
-
A common strategy for creating more complex types of documents
is to have the EditorKit implementation return a factory. Since
the EditorKit ties all of the pieces necessary to maintain a type
of document, the factory is typically an important part of that
and should be produced by the EditorKit implementation.
Warning:
Serialized objects of this class will not be compatible with
future Swing releases. The current serialization support is
appropriate for short term storage or RMI between applications running
the same version of Swing. As of 1.4, support for long term storage
of all JavaBeansTM
has been added to the java.beans
package.
Please see XMLEncoder
.