Question

I’m designing a gui based on org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TabItem.

Is there a way to show a TabItem inside a TabFolder as “inactive”, i.e. with the usual light gray color and having all the contained elements not active as well?

It is something in other systems I can design. I thought it would be possible with swt as well, but I’m new to this environment and after Googling on this topic, I couldn’t find any solution. Is it possible at all?

Answer 1

It’s not possible to set TabItem inactive (disabled), because there will be no way how to click on the selected TabItem then. But is pretty easy to disable content of selected TabItem. Just get Control which is binded to the TabItem instance and call setEnable(false).

/*
 * TabFolder example snippet: create a tab folder (six pages)
 *
 * For a list of all SWT example snippets see
 * http://www.eclipse.org/swt/snippets/
 */
import org.eclipse.swt.*;
import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Rectangle;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.*;

public class TabItemDisable {

public static void main (String [] args) {
    Display display = new Display ();
    final Shell shell = new Shell (display);
    final TabFolder tabFolder = new TabFolder (shell, SWT.BORDER);
    Rectangle clientArea = shell.getClientArea ();
    tabFolder.setLocation (clientArea.x, clientArea.y);
    for (int i=0; i<6; i++) {
        TabItem item = new TabItem (tabFolder, SWT.NONE);
        item.setText ("TabItem " + i);
        Button button = new Button (tabFolder, SWT.PUSH);
        button.setText ("Page " + i);
        item.setControl (button);
    }
    tabFolder.pack ();

    // disabling content of selected TabItems
    tabFolder.getTabList()[0].setEnabled(false);
    tabFolder.getTabList()[2].setEnabled(false);
    tabFolder.getTabList()[4].setEnabled(false);

    shell.pack ();
    shell.open ();
    while (!shell.isDisposed ()) {
        if (!display.readAndDispatch ()) display.sleep ();
    }
    display.dispose ();
}
}