Nebula Grid widget on RAP

June 29, 2012 | 1 min Read

All of you who are using SWT/RWT Tree or Table widget, know their limitations pretty well. Sooner or later you’ll look for a way to add check boxes in multiple columns, group columns and show/hide them dynamically or put some information in a Table footer. Nebula Grid widget fulfills all these requirements. That’s why we decided to port RAP to it.

As a developer who believes in test-driven development, my first step was to look for existing Nebula Grid JUnit tests that could ensure the correctness of the implementation. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any. Over four weeks we created the first prototype based on the existing client-side Tree widget. Currently, only Grid footer, column groups and check boxes in multiple columns are implemented, but the work on the client-side is still in progress (see bug 383520). The prototype is backed up by 680 JUnit tests, which cover more than 93.7% of the code. Please note that the Grid can’t be used as a replacement for virtual Tree or Table because of its limited virtual capabilities.

The prototype is available in the following RAP Incubator repository [1]. The next step in the development process is to support items with different height.

[1] https://git.eclipse.org/c/rap/incubator/org.eclipse.rap.incubator.nebula-grid.git

Ivan Furnadjiev

Ivan Furnadjiev

RAP Project Lead at EclipseSource