SWT: A Developer's Notebook

Changing the Background Color

A useful technique that enables you to visually delimit data in a table is to change the background color of a TableItem.

How do I do that?

Use setBackground() to specify the background color of an individual TableItem:

item2.setBackground(new Color(d,127,178,127));

Adding this code to the Example 12-1 class results in Figure 12-6.

Figure 12-6. Setting the background color

What just happened?

setBackground( ) accepts a Color object created by passing a reference to the Display in which the table is being managed, as well as three int values representing the Red, Green, and Blue values of the desired color.

This technique is useful in creating alternating “bar paper” looks that visually separate rows of data (the Quicken check register program is an example that uses this technique).

What about...

the times you want to cause a row to be highlighted if a cell in that row contains a particular value? Using the table from TableShellExample as a basis, the following code will cause all rows in which the Address column contains the word “Ohio” to be highlighted by changing the background color to green:

TableItem[] tia = t.getItems( );
        
for(int i = 0; i<tia.length;i++)
{
    if (tia[i].getText(2).equals("Ohio"))
    {
        tia[i].setBackground(new Color(d,127,178,127));
    }
}

The preceding code retrieves an array of items from the table and then loops through the array. For every ...