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SplitPane, Cursors and Push Registration

SplitPane, Cursors and Push Registration

Header Image

Until this weeks release push notification was registered using Display.registerPush(Hashtable, boolean) the thing is that both of these arguments to that method are no longer used or not the best way to implement registration. So we deprecated that method and introduced a new version of the method Display.registerPush().

Since push fallback hasn’t been supported since we migrated to the new API it’s going away isn’t a big deal but up until recently the Hashtable argument was used to pass the GCM push ID.

This is pretty old code from before our migration to Java 5 so it used Hashtable, we since migrated all the way to Java 8

To include the Android push id we should now use the build hint gcm.sender_id which will work for Chrome JavaScript builds too and is probably the better approach overall.

SplitPane

Steve recently introduced a cool new split pane component to Codename One which is a long time request from many users:

We didn’t add it in the past because it’s so desktop specific but now that we have the JavaScript port and it makes more sense. To get the video above I changed SalesDemo.java in the kitchen sink by changing this:

private Container encloseInMaximizableGrid(Component cmp1, Component cmp2) {
    GridLayout gl = new GridLayout(2, 1);
    Container grid = new Container(gl);
    gl.setHideZeroSized(true);

    grid.add(encloseInMaximize(grid, cmp1)).
            add(encloseInMaximize(grid, cmp2));
    return grid;
}

To:

private Container encloseInMaximizableGrid(Component cmp1, Component cmp2) {
    return new SplitPane(SplitPane.VERTICAL_SPLIT, cmp1, cmp2, "25%", "50%", "75%");
}

This is mostly self explanatory but only “mostly”. We have 5 arguments the first 3 make sense:

  • Split orientation

  • Components to split

The last 3 arguments seem weird but they also make sense once you understand them, they are:

  • The minimum position of the split – 1/4 of available space

  • The default position of the split – middle of the screen

  • The maximum position of the split – 3/4 of available space

The units don’t have to be percentages they can be mm (millimeters) or px (pixels).

Mouse Cursor

You might have noticed the video above was shot in the simulator, one of the tell tale signs is the mouse cursor.

If you paid attention you might have noticed the cursor changed its appearance when I was hovering over specific areas to indicate resizability on the Y axis. This is a new feature in Codename One that’s available in the desktop and JavaScript port. It’s off by default and needs to be enabled on a Form by Form basis using Form.setEnableCursors(true);. If you are writing a custom component that can use cursors such as SplitPane you can use:

@Override
protected void initComponent() {
    super.initComponent();
    getComponentForm().setEnableCursors(true);
}

Once this is enabled you can set the cursor over a specific region using cmp.setCursor() which accepts one of the cursor constants defined in Component.

Future Desktop

We have a lot of plans for improving the desktop/web support in Codename One moving forward but these specific features are a part of a specific set of changes going into the new GUI builder.

I don’t think this is the time to share too much but Steve has been working on some GUI builder changes that we are all pretty excited about. We want these changes to be great on launch and not something we constantly tune so they might take some time. I hope they will land in 3.7 but I’d rather we launch them after if we can’t get them to the place where they should be…​

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