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FormText in Cell [message #1830227]

Tue, 21 July 2020 08:19

Benedict Wright

Messages: 10
Registered: February 2019

Junior Member

I have a text that is HTML formatted AND contains a link.
The RichTextCellPainter is able to render the formatted text, however it does not render the links, nor is it possible to add a LinkListener.

On the other hand there exists a FormText widget (org.eclipse.ui.forms.widgets.FormText) that supports exactly that.

My question: Is there a cellpainter that supports FormText, or is this something considered by the devs (Feature Request)?

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Re: FormText in Cell [message #1830229 is a reply to message #1830227]

Tue, 21 July 2020 08:51

Dirk Fauth

Messages: 47
Registered: March 2020

Member

No there is no cellpainter that supports FormText. This is for several reasons:
- NatTable does not have any dependency to org.eclipse.ui packages, as we are a SWT/JFace widget.
- FormText is by itself a widget. And therefore could be only integrated as an editor control, but not as a painter. The painter is rendering on a Canvas. It does not stack widgets.

That said, a painter for FormText input would need the same feature implementation as the missing feature in the RichTextCellPainter. The rendering of the link (how is the information provided by FormText?) and the implementation of a listener that gets triggered on click on the link. Here the complexity is in getting the interaction with NatTable to work together with the interaction in the painter to trigger some action. And the actions could also vary from opening the link in a browser up to jumping to another cell in the table.

I know two approaches that tried to contribute this, but they never got finished because of underestimating the complexity of this topic.

There is this feature request for Nebula RichText: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=511353
There is this feature request for NatTable: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=511104

Without some sort of sponsoring I don't think that I will have the time to implement that feature soon. But NatTable is an open source project. So if you want to work on this and contribute back, I will be happy to review and to integrate it in Nebula RichText and NatTable.

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