GUI application

A GUIApplication are applications which manage the concept of "tabbed documents". They support several concepts which are not available on regular applications, such as:

• Managing tabs
• Managing menus through a menu bar
• A toolbar
• A message area

There is one abstract GUI implementations for the Swing framework:

• The AbstractMDIApplication provide a GUI and allows to create a Swing Application

Initializing the application GUI

To use the menu factory in the application, you need to call one of the following methods:

• The AbstractMDIApplication.preparePanels(int, MDIMenuFactory) with a default MessageArea, a Toolbar, and a Status bar
• The AbstractMDIApplication.preparePanels(int, boolean, boolean, MDIMenuFactory) with a default MessageArea in the application
• The AbstractMDIApplication.preparePanels(SwingMessageArea, boolean, boolean, MDIMenuFactory) with a custom MessageArea

These methods should be called after the application configuration has been initialized and the plugins have been registered.

Menus and toolbar

Menus and toolbar are managed by the menu factory and can be retrieved by the following methods in the application:

• GUIApplication.getToolBarPanel() return the toolbar
• GUIApplication.getMenuBar() return the menu bar

Handling tabs

The GUIApplication has an API allowing to:

• Add a tab
• Select a tab
• Close a tab, all tabs except one, or all tabs
• Add a close button in tabs
• Specify that a tab has been modified

Showing dialogs

The application has several has several methods to directly show message dialogs. Also the MDIDialogBuilder allows to add any type of dialogs in the framework.

Message area

The message area is managed directly in the application and can be retrieved by:

• The GUIApplication.getMessageArea() method
• The AbstractMDIApplication.message field

Menu Factory

The MDIMenuFactory and its abstract implementation AbstractMDIMenuFactory allows to manage the menus and toolbar for the application.

Opening dialogs

The MDIDialogHelper and its default implementation DefaultMDIDialogHelper allows to open dialogs.