Description Miles Parker 2010-03-04 20:37:12 EST

Created attachment 161056 [details]
Patch for Master Detail support.

Hi guys,

As threatened :) here is the support for Master Detail within EEF forms. It's pretty slick I have to say, and I can say that because the overall abstraction of EMF and EEF made some cool things possible. You can drill down into arbitrary (depending on screen real estate) levels of detail for any EMF relations. You can add and remove objects using the existing buttons. It remembers the expanded state of sub-forms, etc.. I've only tried it with forms, but I assume it should work with other parts as well. There is a fair amount of subtlety involved in getting the events to the right place and so on and I think that is working pretty well at this point. Undo isn't working well right now, but I think that's due to bug 304624 I reported today. Except for one place where we don't have a user code block, full auto-regeneration currently works as well!

So, Goulwen asked how we could model this..he sounded a bit skeptical. :) The idea is to have a ViewReference that includes the information for the referring reference, etc.. In other words, all we need is what is in the constructor for GenericDetailPropertiesEditionPart, and that should all be available or easily added to the .components EEF model. For obvious reasons, I haven't gone mucking around with the Acelo generation or models. Should I have a separate bug for the generation and model support, or could we just keep it here?

Below is a use case, which should also serve as guidance for integrating with model. I don't have this example tested because I just ensued my own code, and I'm not sure that the eef example models are working..plus I'm way over the time I planned to spend on this! There are as always lot's of improvements that could be made.

See my blog entry for background and setup steps 1-3. http://milesparker.blogspot.com/2010/02/pimping-eef-master-detail.html

You don't need to register anything or do anything else complicated -- you can use all of the existing forms and providers as is. You just need to change LibraryPropertiesEditionPartForm in these places:

    // Start of user code for attributeDetail widgets declarations
    private AbstractDetailPropertiesEditionPart bookDetail;
    // End of user code


	protected void addToBooks() {
		// Start of user code addToBooks() method body
        bookDetail.addDetailObject();
        // End of user code

	}

	protected void createBooksGroup(FormToolkit widgetFactory, final Composite view) {
...
// Start of user code for booksDetail widgets implementation
        bookDetail = new SimpleDetailPropertiesEditionPart("Book", propertiesEditionComponent, books, LibrariesViewsRepository.SContext.books,
            LibrariesViewsRepository.class, "label", LibrariesViewsRepository.FORM_KIND,
            LibrariesPackage.eINSTANCE.getBook(), LibrariesViewsRepository.Book.class);
        bookDetail.createControls(widgetFactory, booksGroup);

        // End of user code
		booksSection.setClient(booksGroup);
	}


	public void initBooks(EObject current, EReference containingFeature, EReference feature) {
		if (current.eResource() != null && current.eResource().getResourceSet() != null)
			this.resourceSet = current.eResource().getResourceSet();
		if (containingFeature != null)
			booksEditUtil = new EMFListEditUtil(current, containingFeature, feature);
		else
			booksEditUtil = new EMFListEditUtil(current, feature);
        bookDetail.init(current, booksEditUtil);
	}

OK, that's it!

As you can see, we need a user code block in initBooks. I couldn't think of a better place to put this.

That's the simple example. That's for use when there is only one instantiable class for a given reference. In the case where there is more, you just need to specialize GenericDetailPropertiesEditionPart like this:

public class BookDetailPart extends GenericDetailPropertiesEditionPart {

    public BookDetailPart(IPropertiesEditionComponent masterComponent, ReferencesTable<? extends EObject> table,
            String masterReference) {
            super("Book", masterComponent, table, masterReference, LibrariesViewsRepository.class, "label",
                    LibrariesViewsRepository.FORM_KIND, MetaABMPackage.eINSTANCE.getBook());
        }


    public Class getDetailView(Object object) {
//you want to have the least specialized classes appear last here..
        if (object instanceof org.example.LargeFormatBook) {
            return LibrariesViewsRepository.LargeFormatBook.class;
        } else if (object instanceof org.example.AudioBook) {
            return LibrariesViewsRepository.SContinuousSpace.class;
        } else if (object instanceof org.example.Book) {
            return LibrariesViewsRepository.Book.class;
        }
...
        return null;
    }
}

Note that the subclass is only necessary because I wasn't able to find a way to get the analogous default view from a given EClass. It should be possible to generate that, right?

OK, enough for now. Hope you have a chance to try it out. I'll try to get a simple screencast or something together on it.

cheers,

Miles