RAP 3.13 brings cell selection to Nebula Grid widget

June 17, 2020 | 2 min Read

](http://rap.eclipsesource.com/demo/release/rapdemo/#nebula-grid)

All of you who are familiar with JFace Tree/TableViewer know the SWTFocusCellManager and FocusCellOwnerDrawHighlighter classes. These classes allow you to highlight and select a particular cell in the SWT Tree and Table widgets. Unfortunately, due to the client-server RAP architecture, the use of these classes always leads to a certain delay and not so good user experience. With the new implementation of cell selection in the Nebula Grid, navigation between cells (keyboard and mouse) and highlighting selected cells is completely done on the client. This improves performance significantly. Moreover, it is now possible to select multiple cells by dragging with the mouse.

In addition to the cell selection, we have also added support for fixed columns - columns that are excluded from scrolling. You can activate this feature in a similar way as in the Tree/Table widgets:

Grid grid = new Grid( parent, SWT.NONE );
gtid.setData( RWT.FIXED_COLUMNS, Integer.valueOf( 2 ) );

The above code excludes the first two columns from scrolling.

Last but not least, it is now possible to move the “tree” column to any available column by using the setTree API in GridColumn.

Test and play with it yourself in our online Controls and Examples demos.

Thanks to our Australian partner, who not only sponsored the development but also helped with early testing and suggestions for improvements, we could successfully deliver this feature in RAP 3.13.

RAP 3.13 is available from our download page and the Eclipse update sites.

Ivan Furnadjiev

Ivan Furnadjiev

RAP Project Lead at EclipseSource