Printing with SWT - An Eclipse Editor Example
22. November 2006
If you build your own editor in the most cases you have to provide the capability to print its content. In addition you probably also have to print different business-logic that is not presented by an editor or viewpart. SWT gives you the possibility to generate printing jobs, what is a bit complex. With the Open-Source API PaperClips there is a possibility to generate data that can be sent to a printer in a very easy way. In addition it provides cool UI-Elments, e.g. a Print Preview. In this article is explained how to register a Print-Action as GlobalAction Handler, with formatting the data you want to print and a Print-Preview.
Do you know the palette from GEF?- It is THE Creation Tool for graphical Editors based on GEF. Unfortunately the requirement is often to drag and drop already created objects into the graphical viewer, e.g from a navigation view, or another JFace-Viewer. Therefore you have to implement your own Drag’n Drop mechanism that is also compatible with the EditPart concept and your Commands. Today I want to show you a way how to drag elements from a TableViewer and drop them on my EditParts. Before dropping the elements you have the possibility to hook in your own code for showing an additional wizard/dialog or if you want to manipulate/replace/adapt the dragged model-object. I have written a small manager and that decides when and how a drop is allowed and how to process the dropped data.
