Overview

Property Editors

The IDE includes a number of property editors in its default property editor search path. Module authors will sometimes want to make use of the fact that such an editor exists when creating JavaBean-related code; most commonly, this means that node properties and system options may declare a property to be of a certain type without explicitly specifying a property editor for it, and rely on the search path to provide a useable property editor so that the UI will function pleasantly.

These editors are in a private package outside of the org.openide hierarchy, so module authors should not attempt to instantiate or otherwise customize them directly. It is possible that NetBeans may decide to remove some such editors if that is necessary for some reason; if this happens, existing module code should not break (as there are no direct references to the deleted classes), but rather properties of that type will cease to be conveniently editable by the user (system options will still be restored from disk correctly, however). If this happens, the module author will need to provide an appropriate editor for the module to be fully functional again. For properties which are critical to a module's operation and must be edited for basic functionality to work, module authors will likely want to provide their own editors to begin with.

A few of these editors are for classes in the Open API packages; in such cases, the documentation for the class in question will mention that there is a property editor available. Also, the following Java platform classes currently have special NetBeans property editors which may be used via the default search path:

Beware that some of these editors may not provide the ability to edit the full range of values of the corresponding data type, as they may be specialized for the NetBeans environment.

A number of other editors and property editor extensions are available in the package org.openide.explorer.propertysheet.editors, but these are likely to be deprecated soon; modules are encouraged to instead rely solely on the default editor search path, and to add needed configuration parameters to their Node.Propertys or PropertyDescriptors so as to be accessible from PropertyEnv as used by smart property editors.


Built on February 22 2001.  |  Portions Copyright 1997-2000 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.