Various cell renders for cells (not for columns only) in JTable

Question

Hello, I need to create a property list with some various values (strings, colors, booleans) just like in Netbeans do. I will use JTable component, but I found I cannot have various cell editors for cells. In JTable cell editors can be only changed for COLUMNS. What sould I do?
ps - is there any JPropertyPanel avaiable for free on the web?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem recently whilst working on a Swing GUI designer (you're not doing the same are you? ;o). Presuming you already know how to create TableCellEditors you can use a very simple hack to achieve your goal.
Either extend the JTable class and override the getCellEditor(int row, int column) method, or override the same method when constructing the JTable (this is what I did). You would need to write something like:
JTable myTable = new JTable(){
    public TableCellEditor getCellEditor(int row, int column) {
        TableModel model = getModel();
        Object data = model.getValueAt(row, column);
        return getDefaultEditor(data.getClass());
}The getCellEditor method is called by JTable whenever a cell is to edited, normally it would check to see if the TableColumn has an editor associated with it and return that, if there wasn't one it would get the class of data for the column and return the default editor for that type of class, which is similar to what it does here except it returns the default editor for the class of an individual item of datum.
Now all you need to do is associate your TableCellEditors with the class types they are to edit with the setDefaultEditor(Class c, TableCellEditor editor) method of JTable. If, for instance, you had an editor for the Color class you would have a line something like:
myTable.setDefaultEditor(Color.class, new ColorCellEditor());Good luck, and I hope this helps.
MS.