Eclipse Community Forums: Nebula » Extending Grid & GridViewer

Help

Home

Home » Eclipse Projects » Nebula » Extending Grid & GridViewer

Show: Today's Messages :: Show Polls :: Message Navigator

Extending Grid & GridViewer [message #42194]

Fri, 26 October 2007 15:25

Chuck Mastrandrea

Messages: 14
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Chris & Tom,

Are there plans for making the Grid and GridViewer become more extensible?

I looked into extending both of them (and associated support classes) but
found some obstacles. One concern is that the javadoc for the GridViewer
states that it's not intended to be subclassed. I've also found numerous
instances of private (or package-private) variables and methods, a final
class, and a package marked internal. I've also found methods that bundle up
alot of functionality, making it difficult to override some behavior without
having to duplicate alot of code.

Please don't get me wrong; I'm not knocking the code at all. These are very
useful components, are well organized, and are greatly appreciated. I'm just
trying to understand if they are intentionally designed to not be
subclassed. While they do cover alot of functionality, and I do intend on
contributing new features to them, I expect that some features will not be
considered useful/general enough for inclusion. It's an understandable goal
to keep the components from getting too bloated. But I think it would be
very desireable for users to be able to extend and provide their own
features and behaviors whenever possible.

Thanks again,
Chuck

Report message to a moderator

Re: Extending Grid & GridViewer [message #42440 is a reply to message #42194]

Mon, 29 October 2007 17:19

Chris Gross

Messages: 253
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Generally the Grid and GridViewer classes are not intended to be
subclassed. Its so hard to define a class that can be extended and at
the same time ensure all the API is correct, supportable, and used as
intended. So generally I have not worked to make inherting from these
classes supported. But...

I would generally like to be 100% extensible (whatever that means). I
would like to open ways to contribute functionality w/o having to extend
the classes. So I would suggest trying to take your issues one by one.
There may be easy things I can do to open up some part of the Grid to
make changing/injecting/swapping behavior. Perhaps I can do things to
make subclassing work for some cases as well.

Regards,
-Chris

Chuck Mastrandrea wrote:
> Chris & Tom,
>
> Are there plans for making the Grid and GridViewer become more extensible?
>
> I looked into extending both of them (and associated support classes) but
> found some obstacles. One concern is that the javadoc for the GridViewer
> states that it's not intended to be subclassed. I've also found numerous
> instances of private (or package-private) variables and methods, a final
> class, and a package marked internal. I've also found methods that bundle up
> alot of functionality, making it difficult to override some behavior without
> having to duplicate alot of code.
>
> Please don't get me wrong; I'm not knocking the code at all. These are very
> useful components, are well organized, and are greatly appreciated. I'm just
> trying to understand if they are intentionally designed to not be
> subclassed. While they do cover alot of functionality, and I do intend on
> contributing new features to them, I expect that some features will not be
> considered useful/general enough for inclusion. It's an understandable goal
> to keep the components from getting too bloated. But I think it would be
> very desireable for users to be able to extend and provide their own
> features and behaviors whenever possible.
>
> Thanks again,
> Chuck
>
>

Report message to a moderator