Question

I’ve got a blocking problem with the sorting functionality of a JTable; this made stall the development of the spare time open source project for 4 months now. Hope to be pointed into the right direction here.

Context: I’m working on extending the functionality of the ps3mediaserver to add a media library with pms-mlx. The UI of the media server has been done using swing.

Problem: When clicking on a column header in the JTable, a seemingly random column gets sorted instead of the one having been clicked.

Current implementation: Here’s the description of the different components and classes being used for the implementation:

• ETable: As alternate row colours aren’t supported by default in the JTable, I’ve switched to the ETable extending the JTable. Source comes from here
• FileDisplayTable: This is the class creating the table. In the init() method, the sorting is being enabled with ‘table.setAutoCreateRowSorter(true);’
• FileDisplayTableCellRenderer: Exists to always align cell content on the left
• FileDisplayTableColumnModel: Does some mapping between internal types and column names
• FileDisplayTableAdapter: This class implements com.jgoodies.binding.adapter.AbstractTableAdapter to map the objects with the table columns.

Possible solutions:

• Preferably, I’d like to keep the current implementation and figure out how to correct the sorting, but I doubt someone can help me out with that!? Additionally their are some bits of code I had to add because of strange behaviours; they’re commented in the code
• The alternate option would be to change the JTable for another control altogether. I’ve made some research but didn’t find the solution I was hoping for. The constraints are that
  • it must be embeddable in a swing UI
  • preferably it should support data bindings
  • support alternate row colours
  • row sorting

At some point it will be possible to open an editing dialogue, where the content of the row has to be retrieved, can be edited and when saved the row has to be updated.

Before reworking the entire thing I’d like to be sure the component will be able to handle all I want to do with it.

I’m more used to create GUIs using .NET in Visual Studio. It’s quite different and a lot more difficult to do the same with swing. Please show me I’m wrong 🙂

[edit] If someone is willing to reproduce the problem, either get the source or the binaries, launch the application, navigate to the media library tab. In the Genral section import some videos by adding some video files. Go to the library section, click on apply to refresh the list and try to sort the table.

Answer 1

It may be useful to know that JTable columns can be dragged by the user. As a result, the view (JTable or a subclass) and model (an implementation of TableModel) may have different column numbers. Similarly, a RowSorter may affect the order or number of rows in the view as compared to the model. The related conversion methods are mentioned in How to Use Tables: Sorting and Filtering. In particular: “When using a sorter, always remember to translate cell coordinates.”

Addendum: As an alternative, consider org.netbeans.swing.etable.ETable or it’s subclass org.netbeans.swing.outline.Outline, depicted here.