Java Question Showing controls in designer?

[keirS]

I think I already know the answer to this (which is no) but I thought I would ask anyway. I will be creating a lot of custom controls probably about 20 or so. Is there anyway these can interact with the Designer?

 

[Erel]

Currently it is not possible. Which views are you creating?

 

[keirS]

I am sub classing:

EditText
Spinner
Label
Panel
CheckBox
RadioButton
Toggle Button

What I am doing is creating a set of controls which are data bound. Like Access, Visual FoxPro, VB etc. I know this is possible to do in B4A without a Lib as I already do it. But shoving every thing into the tag property makes the code very difficult to understand and to manage. Its also not very intuitive.

 

[warwound]

I seem to remember reading on the forum that the deisgner is powered by an APK that contains all the default B4A views.

So no way to add a custom View / library to the designer.

I meant to ask if the source code for that APK was available and if so whether we could produce a custom APK that the designer would use - thus enabling us to add custom Views using the designer.
Not a very practical solution - but if possible then it'd enable an individual user to customise the designer with their own Views.

Martin.

 

[Erel]

The designer source code is not available. By itself it will not be enough as the IDE also needs to support the new views.

I know this is possible to do in B4A without a Lib as I already do it. But shoving every thing into the tag property makes the code very difficult to understand and to manage. Its also not very intuitive.

Consider creating a class for each such view. The class will have a reference to the original view and will allow you to add the required logic. Composition is almost always preferable over inheritance.

 

[keirS]

I will need to think about that. I will definitely not be just chucking all the logic required in to the subclass. I want build something that can be extended to be easily serializable and maybe turned into a light weight ORM framework in the future.