Dialogs and Controls

OpenOffice.org Developer's Guide

Graphical User Interfaces

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• Exception Handling
• Dialogs and Controls
• Dialog Creation

• Instantiation of a Dialog
• Setting Dialog Properties
• Adding Controls to a Dialog
• Displaying Dialogs

• Dialog Handling

• Events
• Dialog Controls

• Common Properties
• Font-specific Properties
• Other Common Properties
• Property Propagation Between Model and Control
• Common Workflow to add Controls
• The Example Listings
• Label Field
• Command Button
• Image Control
• Check Box
• Radio Button
• Scroll Bar
• List Box
• Combo Box
• Progress Bar
• Horizontal/Vertical Line Control
• Group Box
• Text Field
• Text Field Extensions
• Formatted Field
• Numeric Field
• Currency Field
• Date Field
• Time Field
• Pattern Field
• Roadmap Control
• File Control
• File Picker
• Message Box

• The Toolkit Service
• Creating Menus

• Summarizing Example to Create a UNO Dialog

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The com.sun.star.awt module provides a set of services specifying UNO components that can be used within dialogs. The controls as well as the dialog itself, follow the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, which separates the component into three logical units, the model, view, and controller. The model represents the data and the low-level behavior of the component and has no specific knowledge of its controllers or its views. In practice this separation is not always strictly followed. The UNO control models can contain information about the visual display of the controls.

The view manages the visual display of the state represented by the model. The controller manages the user interaction with the model. Toolkit controls combine the view and the controller into one logical unit that forms the user interface for the component. For example, the text field model is implemented by the com.sun.star.awt.UnoControlEditModel service that extends the com.sun.star.awt.UnoControlModel service. All aspects of the model are described as a set of properties which are accessible through the com.sun.star.beans.XPropertySet interface. The view is responsible for the display of the text field and its content.

The controller handles the user input provided through the keyboard and mouse. If the user changes the text in a text field, the controller updates the corresponding model property. The controller also updates the view. For example, when the user selects some text in a text field and presses the delete key on the keyboard, the marked text in the text field is deleted.

A more detailed description of the MVC paradigm can be found in The Model-View Paradigm.

The base for all the Toolkit controls is the com.sun.star.awt.UnoControl service that exports the following interfaces:

• The com.sun.star.awt.XControl interface specifies control basics. For example, it gives access to the model, view and context of a control.
• The interfaces com.sun.star.awt.XWindow, com.sun.star.awt.XWindow2, com.sun.star.awt.XWindowPeer specify operations for a window component. They are all based on an equal footing and are a available on arbitrary UNO-objects representing windows.
• The com.sun.star.awt.XView interface provides methods for attaching an output device and drawing an object.

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