Getting Further with Spring RCP

Creating a Dialog

Next, when the popup item is selected, we want to display a dialog showing the values of the currently selected row. You can use standard Swing dialogs, if you like. However, if you use the dialogs provided by Spring RCP, you can make use of the Spring RCP rules based validation and the Spring RCP Form Builder. (Both of these topics are discussed later.) Spring RCP provides 4 types of dialogs: ConfirmationDialog, InputApplicationDialog, TitledPageApplicationDialog, and WizardDialog.

In this section, we use the TitledPageApplicationDialog, which gives you a dialog with a title area and an area for information or for an error message. The content of this dialog is managed either by a FormBackedDialogPage, which is what we use in this article, or a CompositeDialogPage, which is applicable when you're dealing with multiple DialogPages simultaneously.

Get started by creating a new class called "CustomerPropertiesDialog" and let it extend the Spring RCP "TitledPageApplicationDialog" class, as shown below, with several of its methods overridden:

package simple;

import org.springframework.richclient.dialog.FormBackedDialogPage;
import org.springframework.richclient.dialog.TitledPageApplicationDialog;
import org.springframework.richclient.form.Form;
import domain.Customer;

public class CustomerPropertiesDialog extends TitledPageApplicationDialog {

    private Form form;

    public CustomerPropertiesDialog(Customer Customer) {
        form = new CustomerForm(Customer);
        setDialogPage(new FormBackedDialogPage(form));
    }

    @Override
    protected void onAboutToShow() {
        Customer Customer = (Customer) form.getFormModel().getFormObject();
        String title = 
                getMessage(
                "customerProperties.edit.title", 
                new Object[]{
                    Customer.getFirstName(),
                    Customer.getLastName()
                });
        setTitle(title);
    }

    @Override
    protected boolean onFinish() {
        form.getFormModel().commit();
        return true;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onCancel() {
        super.onCancel();
    }
    
}

Notice the definition of the "title" string in line 22 above. It refers to a message, which you need to define as follows in the "messages.properties" file:

customerProperties.edit.title=Edit Contact: {0} {1}

In this way, because we retrieve the firstname and lastname in the second argument to the "getMessage" call, we will be able to display the current line's firstname and lastname in the dialog that we are creating here.

Also, note that line 13 above will create an error in your code because it refers to a form that you have not yet created. And here is our form, extending the Spring RCP "AbstractForm" class, which is a placeholder for the code that we will add there in the next section:

package simple;

import domain.Customer;
import javax.swing.JComponent;
import javax.swing.JPanel;
import org.springframework.richclient.form.AbstractForm;

public class CustomerForm extends AbstractForm {

    CustomerForm(Customer customer) {
        super(customer);
        setId("customer");
    }

    @Override
    protected JComponent createFormControl() {
        JPanel panel=new JPanel();
        return panel;
    }

}

In line 12 above, we set the form's ID to "customer". This is a unique ID that needs to be passed in the constructor and is used for label construction. As a result, we need to bear this ID in mind when setting the form's title and description, because these are used to set the labels in the form, in the messages.properties file:

customer.title=Customer Information
customer.description=Enter the details of the customer below.

Now, back in the CustomerView, let the PropertiesExecutor open the dialog that you created above:

private class PropertiesExecutor extends AbstractActionCommandExecutor {

    @Override
    public void execute() {
        new CustomerPropertiesDialog(customerTable.getSelectedCustomer()).showDialog();
    }

}

The code above refers to a method in the CustomerTable that you have not created yet. Open that class and then add the following to it, for retrieving the data for the currently selected row in the table:

public Customer[] getSelectedCustomers() {
    int[] selected = getTable().getSelectedRows();
    Customer[] customer = new Customer[selected.length];
    for (int i = 0; i < selected.length; i++) {
        customer[i] = (Customer) getTableModel().getElementAt(selected[i]);
    }
    return customer;
}

public Customer getSelectedCustomer() {
    return (Customer) getSelectedCustomers()[0];
}

Run the application again and this time when you invoke the Properties popup item, you should see the following result: