Getting Even Further with Spring RCP (2)

FlexDock Integration

Let's use the FlexDock docking framework now. FlexDock, according to its site, is a docking framework for use in cross-platform Swing applications and offers features you'd expect in any desktop docking framework such as tabbed & split layouts, drag-n-drop capability, floating windows, collapsible containers, and layout persistence. (Although, I haven't figured out layout persistence yet... can someone help?)

We'll use it to create a window layout that looks as follows:

In a nutshell, you need to implement a FlexDock "PerspectiveFactory" that supplies the initial view layout and then inject it into the "ApplicationPageFactory" bean in the richclient-application-context.xml file. Here are the related snippets from the richclient-application-context.xml file:

<bean id="lifecycleAdvisor" class="simple.SimpleLifecycleAdvisor">
    <property name="windowCommandBarDefinitions" value="ui/commands-context.xml" />
    <property name="windowCommandManagerBeanName" value="windowCommandManager" />
    <property name="menubarBeanName" value="menuBar" />
    <property name="toolbarBeanName" value="toolBar" />
</bean>
    
<bean id="applicationPageFactory" depends-on="serviceLocator" 
      class="org.springframework.richclient.application.docking.flexdock.FlexDockApplicationPageFactory">
    <property name="floatingEnabled" value="true" />
    <property name="defaultPerspective" value="defaultPerspective" />
    <property name="perspectiveFactory">
        <bean class="simple.DemoPerspectiveFactory">
            <property name="dockableIds">
                <list>
                    <value>NewSpringView</value>
                    <value>NewSpringView1</value>
                    <value>NewSpringView2</value>
                    <value>NewSpringView3</value>
                </list>
            </property>
        </bean>
    </property>
</bean>

Note: Above we're not making use of the "startingPageId" property. Instead, we'll let the "applicationPageFactory" handle all of the layout for us. Line 13 refers to this class that I created in the "simple" package:

import java.util.List;

import org.flexdock.perspective.LayoutSequence;
import org.flexdock.perspective.Perspective;
import org.flexdock.perspective.PerspectiveFactory;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.InitializingBean;
import org.springframework.util.Assert;

public class DemoPerspectiveFactory implements PerspectiveFactory, InitializingBean {

    private List<String> dockableIds;

    public Perspective getPerspective(String perspectiveId) {
      
        Perspective perspective = new Perspective(perspectiveId, perspectiveId);
        LayoutSequence sequence = perspective.getInitialSequence(true);

        String prevDockableId = null;
        for (String dockableId : this.dockableIds) {
            sequence.add(dockableId, prevDockableId);
            prevDockableId = dockableId;
        }

        return perspective;
    }

    public void afterPropertiesSet() throws Exception {
        Assert.notEmpty(this.dockableIds, "No dockable ids specified");
    }

    public List<String> getDockableIds() {
        return dockableIds;
    }

    public void setDockableIds(List<String> dockableIds) {
        this.dockableIds = dockableIds;
    }
    
}

Further reading:

• http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=32457
• http://www.nabble.com/Re:-Spring-Rich-and-FlexDock-p6425472.html
• http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.springframework.rcp.devel/3981