JXTable Tutorial

Step 3: Row Highlighting

JXTable supports a highlighting mechanism which changes the background color of rows. With JTable, you would need to supply your own renderer to do this; with JXTable, you supply one or more Highlighters. A Highlighter implements rules for how a row's background should be colored.

In the SampleJXTableDemo, we use an AlternateRowHighlighter, a subclass of Highlighter with static constant Highlighter instances preconfigured for the task. The demo uses an AlternateRowHighlighter.classicLinePrinter for highlighting.

    jxTable.setHighlighters(new HighlighterPipeline(
        new Highlighter[]{ AlternateRowHighlighter.classicLinePrinter }));

An AlternateRowHighlighter changes the background color of every other row in the table. The classicLinePrinter mimics the color scheme on old printer paper where every other line was colored a light green, to help improve legibility, especially on wide tables of data.

A JXTable can have one or more Highlighters assigned in a HighlighterPipeline. The 'pipeline' concept is also used for Filters, and for sorting. A HighlighterPipeline is instantiated with an array of Highlighters, but you can also add and remove Highlighters from the HighlighterPipeline programmatically using addHighlighter() and removeHighlighter(). In our example, we use a single Highlighter passed in as an array to the HighlighterPipeline.

In the SampleJXTable demo, we add a second highlighter after the fact--this one tracks mouse movements and highlights the row on rollover:

    // ...oops! we forgot one
    jxTable.getHighlighters().addHighlighter(
        new RolloverHighlighter(Color.BLACK, Color.WHITE ));
    jxTable.setRolloverEnabled(true);

When more than one Highlighter is in the HighlighterPipeline, each one is called in turn to apply its highlighting. You could add a ConditionalHighlighter on top of the AlternateHighlighter so that, apart from every other row being colored, certain columns that meet conditional criteria are automatically highlighted as well. Of course, you can also write your own Highlighters.

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