Swing Hacks

Preview ZIP and JAR Files #32

Chapter 4, File Choosers

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HACK

With the code all in place, the running program will look like Figure 4-6.

As a nice enhancement, you could modify

ImagePreview to show previews of

other kinds of files (e.g., PDF or SVG). You could even preview text files by

showing the first few lines of the document. Because

setAccessory( ) lets

you set any

JComponent, you could create a panel that does something com-

pletely different, like connecting to a network drive, à la iDisk, or setting

import preferences like encoding and line endings.

H A C K

#32

Preview ZIP and JAR Files Hack #32

This hack will show you how to customize the file chooser to let users

navigate and load files from inside a ZIP or JAR file archive.

Most modern operating systems now have built-in support for compressed

files, usually in the form of ZIP files. You can open up a ZIP file and navi-

gate the contents from within the standard file browser or dialog box, all

without actually uncompressing anything. Surprisingly,

JFileChooser

doesn’t support ZIP files, even though Java has built-in ZIP support in the

java.util.zip package. And, since JAR files are in the same format, you get

two-for-one today!

Figure 4-6. A file chooser that previews images