Swing Hacks

Search Through JTables Easily #26

Chapter 3, Tables and Trees

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133

HACK

The export button has a simple action listener that calls exportTable( ) on a

new

ExcelExporter. The trick to getting Excel to open the file with a double-

click on the desktop is to name the file with an .xls extension. It won’t be a

real Excel file, but the operating system will think that it is and pass it to

Excel anyway. Then Excel will look at the file, realize it’s actually a tab-

delimited text file, and load it with the right import filter.

Figure 3-10 shows what the program looks like.

H A C K

#26

Search Through JTables Easily Hack #26

Use this nifty TableModel decorator to search your JTables with minimal

fuss.

Tables have a tendency to get very big; thousands of rows are not uncom-

mon. But this causes some severe navigational issues for your users, like

extremely small scrollbar handles, which make it difficult for them to find

the information they need. One way to get around these navigational issues

is to allow your users to search the table data rather than displaying it all.

This hack shows you how to simply search your tables using the Apache

open source Lucene search engine.

JTable Search Strategy

Rather than a custom TableModel with integrated Lucene functionality, you

can build a

TableModel decorator instead. This will allow you to search pre-

existing

TableModels without modifying them directly.

This works by keeping a set of links to an internal table model based on

search criteria. For example, say you have 10 rows in your original table

model, and you have a search that limits the results to 5 of those rows. Your

inner

TableModel will remain unchanged, but your TableModel decorator will

have links to only five of the inner

TableModel rows—making it look like it

only has five rows of data.

Figure 3-10. An Excel-exporting JTable