JDeveloper Designer

Question

JDeveloper Team,
Instead of creating my screens via the wizard or the form designer, I manually coded them. The only way I am able to view them properly is during runtime. When I click on the "design" tab the form loads blank. The objects are listed on the panels on the left but the screen design is blank. When creating forms by manually coding them as opposed to using a wizard or dropping visual objects on the form in design mode, is there any way for me view the design and layout of the form without having to run the application? Thanks.

Answer 1

In order for the JDeveloper UI Designer to recognize and display code done by hand, that code must follow the JDeveloper design patterns. Specifically;
1) All UI that you want to appear within the JDeveloper UI Designer (e.g. UI initialization such as property sets, adding of children, etc.) must be within a method of type void taking no arguments and named jbInit - e.g. private void jbInit().
2) All UI components (e.g. JButton etc.) and LayoutManager instances used by those components must either be declared at the class level (i.e. members of the class) or as local variables within the jbInit() method. JDeveloper works best when the components and layouts are declared as class members as opposed to local variables.
3) Note that the UI Designer is restricted to using introspection and target invokation without benefit of runtime state information. Based on the parsing of the declarations of the members and simple property setting method calls made on those members, we are able to instantiate live instances and invoke property set methods on them (e.g. the declaration JButton jButton1; tells us that a n object named jButton1 of type JButton exists and thus we may instantiate an instance of JButton for use in the UI Designer. Likewise, parsing the statement jButton1.setBackground(...); allows us to recognize and invoke the setBackground method on our live jButton1 instance after we have worked some magic to determine the live value to be setting).
However, any UI taking place within the body of a conditional will not be performed since the outcome of the condition can not consistently be determined without executing the code live. Likewise setting a property to a value determined by any non static methodcall involving anything other than one of the member components can not be relied upon [e.g. jButton1.setBackground(someMethod());] since there is no running context in which that method call may be executed. The only 'runtime' context available to the UI Designer is the live objects instantiated based upon the object declarations discovered.