I need to create a line graph to allow me to drag it in different coordinate axes, when dragged backward the graph should show data that have already been painted.
"Currently I have some graphs showing real-time data, I receive this data via sockets, then I want to be able to pause the graph and dragging back to see the data that have already been shown."
I'm not experienced with Javafx, so I apologise if this misses the mark.
I have made something similar in the past using my own component and a JScrollPane. You can make a "scrolling savvy" client, allowing you to render the history as the user drags the graph backwards. If you make your client Scrollable, you have full control on how it responds. While this isn't javafx specific, there is a javafx panel, so I can't see a reason this wouldn't work, assuming comparability with light weight swing components.
Oracle introduce it here: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/components/scrollpane.html#scrollable
Related
I am trying to develop an application in Java (Swing) that lets me overlay a grid on the screen, and be able to click things behind the grid -- say, an icon the desktop for example.
Would I approach this problem with a Transparent JFrame or a Transparent JWindow?
Whatever I use, the transparent window/frame needs to
always be on top.
occupy the entire screen.
register every click with a mouse listener.
record the coordinates of the clicks on the screen.
allow me to use the Graphics class to draw a grid on the screen, and other elements, like numbers or images, that should also be click through.
Any direction would be appreciated.
Apologize if I haven't been specific enough, but I haven't found a demo window or frame that can do all these things. There's an example here and another here -- but I don't know how to use WindowUtils in Eclipse. This is my first time in GUI development and I've never used external libraries aside from the base Java classes.
on top: Frame.setAlwaysOnTop() should work for you
full screen: Setting the window size to the display size will make it occupy the entire screen
events and overlay painting: The actual behavior may vary by platform, but typically if you're using an alpha component to draw into your window, and your window is nominally transparent, those areas not painted (or sometimes those painted below a certain alpha threshold) will pass events through to whatever applications, windows, or components are underneath.
If you capture events, you then have to re-introduce them to whatever window is below yours, which is non-trivial. If you don't capture events, you need to install an OS-specific event handler to capture events of interest.
JNA's WindowUtils.setWindowTransparent() should provide the paint/event behavior required, or you can use the AWTUtils equivalent provided in more recent JVM releases.
This program will have an infinite canvas (ie as long as the user scrolls, it becomes bigger) with a tiled background image, and you can drag and drop blocks and draw arrows between blocks. Obviously I won't use a layout manager for placing blocks and lines, since they will be absolutely positioned (any link on this, possibily with a snapping feature?). The problem arises with blocks and lines. Basically I'll have two options:
Using a simple layout for each building block. This is the simplest and clearest approach, but does it scale well when you have hundreds of objects? This may not be uncommon, just imagine a database with 50 tables and dozens of relationships
Drawing everything with primitives (rectangles, bitmaps, etc). This seems too complicated (especially things like text padding and alignment) but may be more scalable if you have a large number of objects. Also there won't be any event handler
Please give me some hints based on your experience. I have never drawn with Java before - well I did something rather basic with PHP and on Android. Here is a simple preview
DISCLAIMER
You are not forced to answer this. I am looking for someone who did something like this before, what's the use of writing I can check an open source project? Do you know how difficult it is to understand someone else's code? I'm talking about implementations details here... Moreover, there is no guarantee that he's right. This project is just for study and will be funny, I don't want to sell it or anything and I don't need your authorization to start it.
Measuring and drawing text isn't such a pain, since java has built in classes for doing that. you may want to take a look at the 2D Text Tutorial for more information. In fact, I did some text drawing computations with a different graphics engine which is much more primitive, and in the end it was rather easy (at least for the single-line drawing, for going multiline see the previous link).
For the infinite canvas problem, that's also something I always wanted to be able to do. A quick search here at stackoverflow gives this which sounds nice, althought I'm not sure I like it. What you can do, is use the way GIMP has a scroll area that can extend as you move - catch the click of the middle mouse button for marking the initial intention to move the viewport. Then, when the mouse is dragged (while the button is clicked) move the viewport of the jscrollpane by the offset between the initial click and the current position. If we moved outside the bounds of the canvas, then you should simply enlarge the canvas.
In case you are still afraid of some of the manual drawing, you can actually have a JPanel as your canvas, with a fixed layout. Then you can override it's paint method for drawing the connectors, while having child components (such as buttongs and text areas) for other interaction (and each component may override it's own paint method in case it wants to have a custom-painted rect).
In my last drawing test in java, I made an application for drawing bezier curves (which are basically curves made of several control points). It was a JPanel with overidden paint method that drew the curve itself, and buttons with custom painting placed on the location of the control points. Clicking on the control point actually was clicking on a button, so it was easy to detect the matching control point (since each button had one control point associated with it). This is bad in terms of efficiency (manual hit detection may be faster) but it was easy in terms of programming.
Anyway, This idea can be extended by having one child JPanel for each class rectangle - this will provide easy click detection and custom painting, while the parent will draw the connectors.
So in short - go for nested JPanels with custom drawing, so that you can also place "on-canvas" widgets (and use real swing widgets such as text labels to do some ready drawing) while also having custom drawing (by overriding the paint method of the panels). Note that the con of this method is that some swing look-and-feel's may interfere with your drawing, so may need to mess a bit with that (as far as I remember, the metal and nimbus look-and-feel's were ok, and they are both cross-platform).
I'm creating an application with Java and SWT, and have a workspace generated on a Canvas. I need to make certain areas (controls) on the canvas trigger an event when mouseover-ed or clicked. Of course this could be done by listening to the MouseMoveEvent and checking the location of the mouse manually, but I would like to know if SWT provides an easier way to do this.
Thanks
As far as I know, there is no facility to automate this. You will need to register mouse listeners and investigate the x & y coordinates manually.
A different approach might be adding individual Canvas objects onto an enclosing Canvas. This way, you could add listeners to the individual controls. This will, however, use more memory (as the underlying object has a buffer, as well as the control on top) and redrawing will be more CPU intensive.
My personal preference goes to the first technique.
Thanks for the answer, Paul. I finally created an ArrayList of Rectangle objects for each control. Whenever the mousemove event triggers, I loop through each Rectangle and call Rectangle.contains() with the mouse coordinates. This solution turned out to be very organized.
In my case, the control events are homogenous (they all do the same thing), but if anyone has multiple control actions, Rectangle.data can be used to contain a Command object.
I am looking for ways to zoom in a Java Swing application. That means that I would like to resize all components in a given JPanel by a given factor as if I would take an screenshot of the UI and just applied an "Image scale" operation. The font size as well as the size of checkboxes, textboxes, cursors etc. has to be adjusted.
It is possible to scale a component by applying transforms to a graphics object:
protected Graphics getComponentGraphics(Graphics g) {
Graphics2D g2d=(Graphics2D)g;
g2d.scale(2, 2);
return super.getComponentGraphics(g2d);
}
That works as long as you don't care about self-updating components. If you have a textbox in your application this approach ceases to work since the textbox updates itself every second to show the (blinking) cursor. And since it doesn't use the modified graphics object this time the component appears at the old location. Is there a possibility to change a components graphics object permanently? There is also a problem with the mouse click event handlers.
The other possibility would be to resize all child components of the JPanel (setPreferredSize) to a new size. That doesn't work for checkboxes since the displayed picture of the checkbox doesn't change its size.
I also thought of programming my own layout manager but I don't think that this will work since layout managers only change the position (and size) of objects but are not able to zoom into checkboxes (see previous paragraph). Or am I wrong with this hypothesis?
Do you have any ideas how one could achieve a zoomable Swing GUI without programming custom components? I looked for rotatable user interfaces because the problem seems familiar but I also didn't find any satisfying solution to this problem.
Thanks for your help,
Chris
You could give a try to the JXLayer library.
There are several tools in it, which could help you to make a zoom. Check the examples shown here. I would recommend you to read more about the TransformUI, from this library. From the example, it seems like it could help solving your problem.
Scaling the view is easy enough; transforming mouse coordinates is only slightly more difficult. Here's an elementary example. I'd keep JComponents out, although it might make sense to develop an analogous ScaledComponent that knows about the geometry. That's where #Gnoupi's suggestion of using a library comes in.
hey you can try this if you want to zoom a image like any other image viewer the use a JPanel draw an image using drawImage() method now create a button and when you click the button increase the size of the panel on the frame it appears as if the image is being viewed in Zoom
You might find Piccolo2D.java API useful: http://code.google.com/p/piccolo2d/
It is very simple.
It touts in particular its smooth zooming. You essentially make a "canvas" that can contain various elements, and can then zoom by just holding right-click and panning the mouse back and forth.
I worked on a team that used it to create this: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/guitar/index.php?title=WebGuitar#EFG.2FGUI_Visualizer
The nodes you see there are clickable links themselves.
Since Java 9, there are VM arguments (actually meant to be used for high dpi scaling) that can render a application with a higher scaling factor:
java -Dsun.java2d.uiScale=2.0 -jar MyApplication.jar
Or:
java -Dsun.java2d.win.uiScaleX=2.0 -Dsun.java2d.win.uiScaleY=2.0 -jar MyApplication.jar
I have made an Ellipse with the help of java.awt.geom.Ellipse2D
Now, I want that whenever user clicks on that ellipse, an event is generated so that I can listen to that event and peform subsequent tasks based on the ellipse which generated that event.
Here is a simple example of an object drawing program that demonstrates click, drag and multiple selection. Also consider JGraph, which is a much more advanced library for graph visualization.
I'm going to assume this is a question asking a way to listen to mouse clicks which are made on an ellipse drawn on some Swing component using Graphics2D.draw.
The simple answer is, there is no way to generate mouse events from graphics drawn on a surface.
However, here's an alternative approach:
Store the Ellipse2D objects from which the ellipses were drawn from in a List.
Register a MouseListener on the Swing component where the user is to click on.
From the MouseEvents generated from the mouse clicks, determine the location at which the mouse was clicked (using MouseEvent.getPoint), and check if the mouse click occurred in any of the Ellipse2Ds contained in the aforementioned List, using the Ellipse2D.contains method.
I don't think this is possible without lots of handcoded stuff (letting the canvas or whatever, listen to mouse events, and calculating yourself if the ellipse was clicked on).
If you want to do more like that consider scenegraph. With that the ellipse would be an object in its own right and you can register event listeners.
Edit as response to comment:
Scenegraph: https://scenegraph.dev.java.net/
google for more resources: scenegraph java
And yes. Scenegraph ist part of the JavaFX stuff, but works nicely with pure Java (no FX)