Java Examples in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Displaying Tables

Now that we’ve seen how to assemble a prototypical Swing GUI, we can move on and start studying some more advanced Swing programming topics. We’ll start with examples of some of the more powerful, and therefore complicated, components. The JTable class displays tabular data. It is particularly easy to use if your data happens to be organized into arrays of arrays. If this is not the case, however, you must implement the javax.swing.table.TableModel interface to serve as a translator between your data and the JTable component.

Example 11-19, which is a listing of PropertyTable.java, does exactly this. PropertyTable is a subclass of JTable that uses a custom TableModel implementation to display a table of the properties defined by a specified JavaBeans class (it uses the java.beans package, which we’ll see more of in Chapter 15). The example includes a main( ) method so you can run it as a standalone application. Figure 11-16 shows the PropertyTable class in action. When studying this example, pay particular attention to the TableModel implementation: the TableModel is the key to working with the JTable component. Also note the PropertyTable constructor method that uses the TableColumnModel to modify the default appearance of the columns in the table.

Figure 11-16. The PropertyTable application

Example 11-19. PropertyTable.java

package je3.gui; import java.awt.*; ...