MiG InfoCom Calendar JavaBeans User Manual
MiG InfoCom AB
MiG Calendar™ JavaBeans Guide
______________________________________________________________
Release 6
MiG Calendar JavaBeans Guide Page 1 / 45
MiG InfoCom AB
MiG InfoCom AB
S:t Olofsgatan 28a
753 32 Uppsala
Sweden
www.miginfocom.com
www.migcomponents.com
COPYRIGHT © MiG InfoCom AB.
All rights reserved.
Java is a trademark registered ® to Sun Microsystems.
http://java.sun.com
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Table of Contents
MiG Calendar Tutorial.................................6
Preface....................................................................... 6
Resources and Developer Support..............................6
Contacting Support via Email............................................6
Contacting support via online forums.................................6
MiG Calendar Product Site................................................6
Bug Reports................................................................... 7
Introduction............................................................... 8
Examples.................................................................... 8
Visual JavaBean Support in Different IDEs..................8
JFormDesigner (Stand alone & Eclipse/IDEA plugin)............9
NetBeans....................................................................... 9
JBuilder X.....................................................................10
JBuilder 2005................................................................11
Swing-Designer (Eclipse plug-in)..................................... 11
Visual Editor (Eclipse default GUI plugin)..........................11
Bean Builder 0.6 alpha & Bean Box 1.1............................12
Other IDEs................................................................... 12
MiG Calendar Approaches.........................................12
Normal or “Core” Approach.............................................12
Themed Approach (deprecated in 6.0, but it works)...........12
JavaBean Approach (Preferred from v6.0)........................ 13
How the Java Bean Classes Relate to the Core
Component............................................................... 13
Installing the JavaBean Components................................14
The JavaBean Classes............................................... 14
DateAreaBean...............................................................14
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DateHeaderBean........................................................... 15
CategoryHeaderBean..................................................... 15
DatePickerBean.............................................................15
DemoDataBean.............................................................15
GridDimensionLayoutBean..............................................16
ActivityAShapeBean.......................................................16
CategoryTreeBean......................................................... 16
PrintPreviewBean.......................................................... 16
PrintSpecificationBean...................................................16
DateSpinnerBean.......................................................... 17
DateComboBean........................................................... 17
DateGroupConnectorBean..............................................17
PaintPanelBean............................................................. 17
How Things Are Connected.......................................17
DateAreaBean...............................................................17
DateGrid Structure........................................................ 18
Connecting a GridDimensionLayoutBean...........................19
Sub Rows..................................................................... 20
Adding Date Headers..................................................... 21
Adding a Category Header..............................................24
SubRowLevels and HeaderRows......................................26
Some examples:........................................................... 28
Grid Lines.....................................................................30
The CategoryTreeBean..............................................30
Date Spinners/Combos and Date Groups..................32
Creating Demo Activities and Categories..................32
The ActivityCategories property......................................33
The Categories property.................................................33
Customizing how the Activities Look......................... 34
Sub Shapes.................................................................. 35
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Adding a Date Picker Component.............................. 35
Advanced Topics....................................................... 37
Adding Activities to your Application................................39
Tracking Changes to Activities......................................... 39
Setting Activity Look Dynamically.................................... 40
Adding Custom Visuals to a DateArea or Header...............42
Tool Tips for Activities.................................................... 44
Even More Advanced Topics...................................... 44
Mixing low level core component code with JavaBeans.......44
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MiG Calendar Tutorial
Preface
This document aims at providing enough information to get
started using the MiG Calendar JavaBeans components in
your application. The MiG Calendar Tutorial contains information
on how the component is structured including a overview of
the different parts.
The MiG Calendar Technical Specification (API JavaDoc) will provide
details and should be used as a reference. It can be found at
the web site indicated below and should also normally be
installed adjacent to this document.
Many IDE:s (Integrated Development Environment) of today
have good support for inline help using JavaDocs. The
standard HTML JavaDocs for the MiG Calendar component is
installed by default and can also be obtained from the site as
described below. We highly recommend using this feature as
it increases productively when creating applications with this
component.
Although all developers independent of prior experience can
benefit from reading this document, general knowledge of
the standard Java API and OOP (Object Oriented
Programming) will help understand some of the details and
why they are implemented in a certain way.
Resources and Developer Support
MiG InfoCom AB provides support through email and the
online forums. Information and updated tutorials will be
made available on the MiG Calendar product site
Contacting Support directly via Email
support@miginfocom.com
Submit a support ticket
http://www.migcalendar.com/support.php
MiG Calendar Product Site
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www.migcalendar.com
Bug Reports
Please submit a support ticket.
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Introduction
MiG Calendar's Visual JavaBean(s) makes the component
very easy to use and configure, especially in combination
with a visual programming tool, sometimes called a RAD-tool
(Rapid Application Development), such as IntelliJ IDEA,
NetBeans, JBuilder, JFormDesigner, SwingDesigner (Eclipse)
and Eclipse's Visual Editor .
The JavaBean classes are wrapper classes around the
different parts of the framework rather than sub classes of
the same. This is for increased decoupling, which means that
one part can be enhanced without being constrained by the
other, optionally more efficient packaging.
All JavaBean classes, including the support classes, reside in
the com.miginfocom.beans.* package. The API
documentation for all properties of these classes is as usual
in the provided JavaDoc HTML pages installed with the
component.
This document will provide information on how to use the
MiG Calendar component's JavaBean classes. For a more
thorough explanation of every property please use the
JavaDoc.
Examples
MiG Calendar comes with examples for the JavaBeans. They
are created with netBeans 5.5. and can be imported directly
and be used for testing, code copying or running.
They are in the installation folder under examples. E.g.
C:\Program Files\MiG InfoCom\MiGCalendar6\examples\
These examples are importable to Eclipse using the plugins
Visual Editor or Swing Designer (Note! In Swing Designer
there's a bug that makes all non-visual components nonparsable. This was confirmed in the daily build 2007-02-15).
Visual JavaBean Support in Different IDEs
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The support for handling advanced beans visually in a
designer is somewhat different for every IDE (Integrated
Development Environments). We expect this to improve
considerably in the short future as RAD (Rapid Application
Development) is getting more popular with Java.
JFormDesigner (Stand alone & Eclipse/IDEA plugin)
Works flawlessly. JFormDesigner has excellent error reporting
if anything goes wrong with the bean in any situation. It also
supports all features of the MiG Calendar Beans.
NetBeans
Works flawlessly. netBeans has almost as good error
reporting as JFormDesigner. Sometimes NB has to be
restarted to for instance see new created Beans and
connecting them to other beans.
The IDE doesn't have support for viewing how visual beans
look if they aren't in the visual JComponent tree (i.e. if they
are in the "Other Components", where all non-visual beans
are). This means that you may have to for instance configure
your DateAreaBean on the visual side even if it is supposed
to be non-visual (for a print preview or date picker) and then
move it to the "Other Components" tree when done.
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Illustration 1: JFormDesigner 2.0 when configuring MiG Calendar
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JBuilder X
Works flawlessly. Error handling is not as good as for those
above.
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Illustration 2: NetBeans 4.1 when configuring MiG Calendar
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JBuilder 2005
Due to a JBuilder 2005 bug (Report # 9476) that prevents
custom components to work in many situations MiG Calendar
component is not usable in the designer. The component can
be handled in the code editor without problems. According to
Borland the bug will not be fixed until the next release.
The bug can be viewed here:
http://qc.borland.com/wc/qcmain.aspx?d=9476
Swing-Designer (Eclipse plug-in)
Works in the latest 6.0 release but there are a few smaller
bugs in the designer for the advanced property editors in the
daily builds (January 2007). This might have been fixed when
you read this. See their daily builds as they often contains
unannounced bug fixes.
Currently (January 2007) you can not add visual beans to the
non-visual workspace which means that DatePickerBean's
and PrintPreviewBean's DateAreaBean must be configured
manually or in the visual component tree and then
copy&pasted.
Visual Editor (Eclipse default GUI plugin)
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Illustration 3: JBuilder X when configuring MiG Calendar
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Visual Editor works with MiG Calendar. It should be noted
though that VE doesn't have the possibility to have custom
beans on its JavaBean palette. You will have to "Choose
Bean.." for every bean you want to add, for every time. This
makes Swing-Designer or JFormDesigner a better choice for
Eclipse.
Bean Builder 0.6 alpha & Bean Box 1.1
These tools are reference tools provided by Sun. They are
not being maintained anymore and are very unfinished and
buggy. MiG Calendar does work to some degree in these
tools but for instance Bean Box does not accept null property
values and that we can't work around.
Other IDEs
If they support visual JavaBeans they will support the MiG
Calendar beans as well, however they are untested.
MiG Calendar Approaches
There are three main approached to choose from when
developing with the MiG Calendar component, this JavaBean
approach is one of them. What approach to use depends on
the expected complexity of the application to be created,
developer experience level and demands on flexibility.
Normal or “Core” Approach
This involves creating for instance DefaultDateArea,
DateAreaContainer and XxxHeader classes manually in code
and configuring these using the methods on them. This is the
most flexible approach but also the most code-centric which
means that the demands on the developer’s abilities are
higher than any of the other approaches.
The core approach enables all of the build in flexibility of the
MiG Calendar component. The other approaches can also
access this core flexibility, there are noting preventing that,
but parts of the core might be preconfigured.
Themed Approach (deprecated in 6.0, but it works)
This involves using the Theme Editor to visually, much like a
normal GUI editor, build a single date area with surrounding
headers. How the activities should look can not be set in the
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theme though, this has to be set manually if the default look
doesn’t fulfills the requirements. It is easy to tweak and build
in functionality but at the expense of extensibility.
JavaBean Approach (Preferred from v6.0)
This approach is what this guide is about. It means using
special wrapper JavaBeans that are delivered with the
component and visually configure these using your favorite
GUI tool, just like is commonly done in Visual Basic, Delphi or
Visual C++. Examples of such tools are:
netBeans – www.netbeans.org
JFormDesigner – www.jformdesigner.com
JDeveloper –
www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/
JBuilder – www.borland.com/jbuilder
Eclipse with Swing-Designer – www.eclipse.org and
www.swing-designer.com
This is the leanest of the different approaches when it comes
to the developer experience level. It is easy to get started
and still as flexible. It is still possible to get to the core
classes and configure and tweak those.
The wrapper layer introduced by the JavaBeans is extremely
thin and does not affect runtime speed or memory
requirements.
This approach is the preferred one from v6.0 and is the
interface that will get most updates in future releases.
How the Java Bean Classes Relate to the
Core Component
The JavaBean classes wrap the core classes and present a
new surface that is optimized to act as visual JavaBean
components that can reside in a GUI tool’s component
palette. This makes it a lot like the Themed approach.
There is also a core level in the component that is accessible
to the developer. It is more code-centric and more flexible
since the JavaBean framework imposes some, but not many,
limitations. This core level is still accessible if the JavaBean
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approach is chosen. See more about this as the “Mixing corelevel …” below.
Installing the JavaBean Components
To use the MiG Calendar component’s JavaBeans you must
add these beans to the tool’s palette. How this is done is
different for every tool and not explained here. Refer to the
GUI tool’s manual on how to do this, it is usually a very
simple task.
The JavaBeans that has full support to be visual JavaBeans in
a tool are:
com.miginfocom.beans.GridDimensionLayoutBean
com.miginfocom.beans.ActivityAShapeBean
com.miginfocom.beans.WestCategoryHeaderBean
com.miginfocom.beans.NorthCategoryHeaderBean
com.miginfocom.beans.DateHeaderBean
com.miginfocom.beans.DemoDataBean
com.miginfocom.beans.DateAreaBean
com.miginfocom.beans.DatePickerBean
com.miginfocom.beans.CategoryTreeBean
com.miginfocom.beans.PrintPreviewBean
com.miginfocom.beans.PrintSpecificationBean
com.miginfocom.beans.DateSpinnerBean
com.miginfocom.beans.DateComboBean
com.miginfocom.beans.DateGroupConnectorBean
com.miginfocom.beans.PaintPanelBean
They all exist in the .jar file “migcalendarbean.jar” that is
located in the “/lib” folder where the component was
installed (e.g. “C:/Program
Files/MiGInfoCom/MiGCalendar/lib/migcalendarbean.jar” on
Windows). This jar file isn't needed for redistribution of your
application, you still only need the migcalendar.jar.
All beans listed above have BeanInfo classes that specify
what they are capable of in the GUI tool. They also have
entries in the so called Manifest in the .jar file. This should
make adding them to the GUI tool a snap.
The JavaBean Classes
DateAreaBean
This class is the main class when using the MiG Calendar
JavaBeans. The other classes described here make little
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