Using FormEditor with a single page

January 4th, 2008  |  Published in Rich Client Platform, Tips  |  6 Comments

I tried to think of a snazzier title for this post, but I’m in a literal mood I guess. So have you ever faced this problem? You want to use the FormEditor class (or it’s new subclass SharedHeaderFormEditor), but you only have a single page.

Sure, you can use FormEditor with a single page, but you’ll wind up with a single tab at the bottom of the editor. It looks a bit goofy:

View of editor showing tab on single page

Well the solution is surprisingly simple. In your subclass of FormEditor, just override the createPages method like this:

protected void createPages() {
	super.createPages();
        if (getPageCount() == 1 &&
		getContainer() instanceof CTabFolder) {
            ((CTabFolder) getContainer()).setTabHeight(0);
        }
}

This code hides the tabs when there is only one page, and you wind up with this:

View of editor with no tabs for single page

Note that you need to call the super method before resizing the tab height, or this won’t work.

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  1. Remy Chi Jian Suen says:

    January 4th, 2008 at 9:55 pm (#)

    I don’t think making the method public is a good idea.

  2. Patrick says:

    January 4th, 2008 at 11:44 pm (#)

    Thanks, Remy. That was a typo and it’s now fixed.

  3. Wassim Melhem says:

    January 5th, 2008 at 2:48 am (#)

    I enjoyed this installment of “stupid editor tricks” :)

    I think this should be the default behavior of FormEditor, so that clients don’t have to worry about overriding it.

  4. Sebastian Davids says:

    January 10th, 2008 at 11:59 am (#)

    https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=74811

  5. idiotgenius says:

    July 26th, 2010 at 6:08 am (#)

    Oh ~ thank you ,big master
    hut how to save what you are editing?

  6. Patrick says:

    July 27th, 2010 at 9:47 am (#)

    Hi idiotgenius,

    Glad you found this tip helpful. As for saving, form editors rely on AbstractFormParts which generally map to form sections. Form parts are registered with the ManagedForm controller and then notified when a save has been requested (commit method is called). You can take whatever action you like in the commit method.

    The PDE editors can serve as a good example here. Check out the org.eclipse.pde.ui source bundle and examine the source code.

    Hope this helps,

    — Patrick

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